Statistics for rain-induced errors in Earth-space links

Theoretical estimates are obtained for the average value of the bit error rate (BER) that would occur using several digital modulation methods on an Earth-space link in the presence of rain attenuation and additive white Gaussian noise. Rain attenuation have been shown to follow log-normal and exponential statistics, and to give a strong degradation of the transmitted signal. We present and discuss the simulation results used to analyze the behaviour of the channel according to different values of the defining parameters (elevation angle, geographic position, ...). A comparison also with the BER values due to the scintillation phenomenon is presented.