Intelligent decision system for measured dust distributions impairing satellite communications

Abstract

Dust and sand storms are regarded as a complex meteorological phenomenon due to high degree of uncorrelated features. Dust particles size distribution, their dielectric constants, visibility level during dusty weather and probable dust storm height are namely a few significant parameters required in modeling the dust storms mathematically. An optimal solution to such weather induced impairments depends on the level of precision in the estimation of aforementioned parameters. This paper presents the experimental dust and sand particles size distribution for Saudi Arabia based on Sieve and Hydrometer tests. Dust storms layered model has been applied to the measured data to compute dust attenuation. Finally, an intelligent decision system has been developed to effectively cater the weather induced signal degradations while maintaining the promised quality of service (QoS) for earth-satellite links. SNR simulation results for measured data before and after incorporating our proposed system depict significant overall improvements.