A Preliminary Investigation on Predictive Site Switching for Next-Gen Satellite Communication

The increasing use of higher frequency bands such as the Ka, Q, and V for satellite communications improves capacity but exposes links to severe rain attenuation. Site diversity offers a mitigation solution, but its effectiveness depends on the switching strategy used. Using attenuation data from the Alphasat Aldo Paraboni experiment at two Italian sites (2015–2024), site switching is simulated under fixed switch outage times of τ = 5 minutes and attenuation thresholds Ath ∈ {2, 5, 10, 15, 20} dB for the Q-band. Results show that a distinction between more aggressive strategies (simple, linear) reduce threshold exceedance and maintain higher C/N0, but at the cost of frequent switching and increased outage due to τ. Respectively more conservative strategies (persistence, Gaussian) reduce switching-related downtime but risk brief attenuation threshold violations and degraded C/N0. The findings highlight the trade-off between responsiveness and stability and motivate future investigations of hybrid approaches for future multi-site high-frequency networks.