Clear sky diurnal behavior of tropospheric scintillation at ku-band satellite communication in equatorial Malaysia

Abstract

Tropospheric scintillation is referred to rapid fluctuation of received signal amplitude. It can cause propagation impairments that affect satellite communication systems operating at above 10 GHz of frequency. In this work, we have exploited 1 year of measured broadcasting signal data collected in Johor, Malaysia to investigate the effects of scintillation intensity on a SatCom system operating at 11.075 GHz with its links pointed towards the MEASAT-1 satellite (an elevation angle of 75.61°). We have investigated the behavior of this scintillation amplitude through the classification and analysis of a timeseries satellite broadcasting signal and have then compared the statistical results with existing scintillation prediction models. The comparison results indicate that there is a significant discrepancy between measured data and those models and that the performance of these prediction models does not appear to be satisfactory, with the exception of the ITU-R and the Ortgies Refractivity model. In addition, we have investigated the diurnal behavior of the scintillation intensity at four different periods of the day and proposed a modified Marzano model to accommodate local meteorological input parameters. The models performances are assessed against the available measurement dataset. The proposed models provide system operators and radio communication engineers with critical information on the fluctuations of tropospheric scintillation variance on the satellite signal during a typical day taken into the account of local meteorological peculiarities.