Scaling Rain Attenuation as a Function of the Link Elevation

The effect of the attenuation due to rain in satellite links increases rapidly for frequencies above 10 GHz. The development of tools to mitigate this impairment relies on the good knowledge on the behavior of the rain attenuation, and in particular on its relationship with frequency, polarization and link elevation. The severe increase in the rain attenuation at low elevations has a strong impact on the design of telecommunications (TLC) and data download systems based on low earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Due to the lack of long-term measurements of rain attenuation on a large range of link elevations, the use of scaling techniques for the complementary cumulative distribution functions (CCDF) of A(θ) becomes essential. This paper presents a method to scale the CCDF of rain attenuation starting from the CCDF along the zenithal path.