Satellite and terrestrial diversity reception performance in tropical regions

A diversity reception scheme using satellite and terrestrial links is an effective technique to reduce the large fading margins in satellite communications operating under fading conditions. The increased demand for bandwidth has led to the employment of frequencies above 10 GHz, where the dominant fading mechanism is rain attenuation. Signal attenuation is aggravated in heavy rain climatic regions. As it has been experimentally verified, the long-term behaviour of rain attenuation induced on a microwave path in tropical regions is approximated by a gamma distribution. In this paper, the outage performance analysis of a satellite-terrestrial diversity reception system operating at frequencies above 10 GHz is presented, employing spatially correlated gamma fading channels. The receiver combines the satellite signal with the signal received by a terrestrial network using either the Maximal Ratio Combining or the Selection Combining techniques. Extended numerical results present the impact of various operational, geometrical and geographical parameters on the outage system performance.