Evaluation of ITU-R rain attenuation prediction methods for terrestrial links

Abstract

In this paper, the evolution of ITU-R rain attenuation prediction methods from previous versions to the most recent one is evaluated in terms of their performance in predicting attenuation, as compared to experimental data collected from 77 terrestrial links located in 16 countries. Test results indicate that the current version performs better than the previous one. However, a prediction method that introduces the concept of effective rain rate and uses the full rainfall rate distribution for the prediction of the rain attenuation distribution is also included in the comparison and outperforms current ITU-R model.