Performance of SatCom Systems Implementing Time Diversity in Equatorial Malaysia

Time diversity is one of the advanced diversity techniques that aim to mitigate propagation impairments for satellite communication systems operating above 10 GHz. In this work, we exploit three years of one-minute integrated rain rate data collected at Kuala Lumpur to simulate rain attenuation time series at 12 GHz using the Stratiform-Convective Synthetic Storm Technique (SC-SST). The performance of time diversity is statistically evaluated as a function of the retransmission delay. The predicted joint probability distributions of attenuation were found to agree with those derived from rain attenuation time series on a link to the MEASAT satellite. The diversity gain, calculated as a function of retransmission delay for different system availability levels, demonstrate the effectiveness of time diversity in improving the Quality of Service (QoS) in this heavy rain region. Although further tests in other sites are necessary, this work points out that the SC-SST and local one-minute integrated point rain rate time series can be combined to reliably infer the performance of time diversity when no satellite-based measurements are available.