A NEW PREDICTION METHOD OF RAIN ATTENUATION ALONG MILLIMETER WAVE LINKS BASED ON A BIVARIATE MODEL FOR THE EFFECTIVE PATH LENGTH AND WEIBULL DISTRIBUTION

Cellular technology is moving towards its 5th generation (5G) that will employ millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies in the attempt to offer more spectrum and multi-Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) data rates to mobile devices. Various unfavorable propagation phenomena affect mmWave communications, rain attenuation being the most severe one. Various rain attenuation prediction models can be taken into account in the design of terrestrial links based either on cumbersome statistical regression, when sufficient local experimental data are available, or on analytical models where only local rain rate measurements are provided. In this paper, a new prediction method for the rain attenuation is proposed based on a bivariate model for the numerical estimation of the effective path length of a millimeter wave terrestrial link and on Weibull distribution for the representation of the point rainfall rate statistics. To validate the proposed prediction method, the actual data taken into account are extracted from experiments included in the databank of ITU-R SG3. The numerical results obtained show a significant improvement of the prediction accuracy compared to existing prediction models.