Study of Rain-Induced Signal Degradation of Terrestrial Radio Links within Minna and Lapai, North-Central, Nigeria

Rain attenuation is a major source of impairment to signal degradation at millimetre wave bands above 10 GHz. This research work determines the extent of signal degradation due to rainfall on terrestrial radio links within Minna and Lapai. The meteorological rainfall data collected from the Automatic Weather Stations installed at the Federal University of Technology, Minna, and at Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, for a period of 3 years (2011-2013) were used to compute the rainfall attenuation on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The Lavergnat-Gole (LG) model was used for the conversion of cumulative distributions of rainfall of 5-min to 1-min integration time in Minna and Lapai respectively. The LG model was used to estimate the rain attenuation in the two stations at a frequency range of 10-18 GHz. The relationship between rain rate and specific attenuation was studied using three years rainfall data. It was observed that a power-law relationship exists between rainfall rates of different integration times. The results for the rain rate exceeded for 0.01% of time, show that the horizontal polarisation experiences more degradation than the vertical polarisation. The results also show that specific and total attenuations increase with increasing operational frequency, and are polarisation-dependent. These results would be useful for planning terrestrial radio networks within the study area.