Impact of Ice Cloud in Dual Polarized Millimeter Wave Air-to-ground MIMO Communication

Recently, Millimeter Wave (mmWave) Air-to-ground (ATG) communication system has received great interest due to their potential to improve connectivity in modern space-air-ground integrated networks in 6G. However, the signal quality of mmWave ATG link is severely influenced by atmospheric distortions. In this paper, in order to study the influence of single-layer ice cloud in Dual Polarized (DP) mmWave ATG Multi-input Multi-output (MIMO) channel, the effect of ice cloud is jointly evaluated in terms of depolarization and random phase distortion based on the Stochastic Model of Clouds (SMoC) method in meteorology science. The impact of these effects with respect to the resulting DP MIMO capacity and to the complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) of the channel capacity is investigated. Simulations suggest that the presence of ice clouds in the link can be a double-edged sword, while it offsets the channel from optimal capacity, it also potentially compensates for capacity loss beyond the Rayleigh distance.