Microwave Attenuation and Prediction of Rain Outage for Wireless Networks in Pakistan's Tropical Region

The microwave attenuation due to rainfall in tropical regions has not been very widely studied yet. In Pakistan's tropical environment, line-of-sight microwave communication links were set up and have been operated for several years to study the microwave attenuation characteristics due to tropical rainfall. In this paper the experimental results are presented, including the cumulative distributions of microwave attenuation and the relationship between specific attenuation and rainfall rate. In addition, a rain outage prediction model is proposed which not only predicts microwave radio link performance but will also be useful in calculating the link degradations due to interference issues. The main focus of this research work has been done keeping in mind the wireless networks of Pakistan. The results show that the rainfall rate, the microwave propagation characteristics, and outage predictions in Pakistan differ from the International Radio Consultative Committee predictions and ITU recommendation P530.7/8, respectively.