Performance Evaluation and Analysis of Cloud Attenuation Prediction Models for Satellite Transmission Quality Improvement

The reliability of social and business interactions on communication infrastructure determines the technological advancement of a nation. In the disclaimer notices of our financial institution’s transaction forms, they declared that they are not liable for communication channels malfunction that may lead to transaction interruption, transmission blackout and delayed services. Thus, effective hydrometeors attenuation margins are needed from accurate models to have reliable signal transmissions. Earlier research works established that increase in transmission frequency is directly proportional to attenuation on the signal, and that satellite communication unavailability in most tropical regions is above the allowed 1% outage percentage, significantly due to cloud attenuation contribution at satellite bands. The existence of clouds in tropical climates is almost perpetual, making cloud models all the more fundamental in tropical regions – which include Africa and about half of the rest of the world. The published new tropical cloud attenuation algorithm and its accompanying new tropical cloud attenuation model (NTM) - derived from it, is hereby further analysed with respect to wider frequency range. In the primary research to this work, data were collected from spectrum analyzer, weather-link and radiosonde equipment. The data were used to calculate values of projected attenuation by each major existing cloud model in the propagation range of 12 to 50 GHz. The predicted cloud attenuation values were spectrally processed and analysed. These results in the observation that the NTM’s predictions generally average the characteristics prediction values of existing models as shown by the graphical outputs. Also, the predicted attenuation values by each of the cloud models converge increasingly with frequency.