Evaluation Performance of Site Diversity Switching Schemes Based on Experimental Rainfall Rate Data in Cyprus

This letter evaluates the performance of the selection combining diversity technique, in which different switching scenarios are applied and assessed. The analysis is based on measured rainfall data, collected in two locations in Cyprus, which are converted into rain attenuation values, adopting the synthetic storm technique. The rainfall-induced attenuation and diversity gains versus exceedance probability are delivered at Ka and Q bands for the various switching schemes. The number of switches, as well as the required fade margins, for an outage below 1%, is also provided. The numerical results reveal that switching with threshold achieves the best performance at both examined frequencies accounting for a reasonable number of initiated switches and low fade margin demands. Finally, the number of switches decreases about 33% when the switching schemes with hysteresis are leveraged.