Performance Analysis of Rain Rate Models for Microwave Propagation Designs over Tropical Climate

Rain attenuation is a major source of impairment to signal propagation at microwave and millimeter wave bands. The procedures for the estimation of rain attenuation values as regard to microwave signals however rely mainly on 1-minute rain rate statistics, particularly those obtained locally from experimental measurement campaigns over a given location. In this paper, we present recent results on 1-minute rain rate statistics required for satellite and terrestrial link designs, as obtained from a 2-year measurement over Akure, Nigeria. The performance of the selected rain rate models; RiceHolmberg (RH) model, the Kitami model, Moupfouma model and the global ITU rain rate model were tested based on four metrics namely: Prediction error, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), SpreadCorrected Root Mean Square Error (SC-RMSE) and the Spearman’s rank correlation. Results indicate that no single model completely outperforms all others. Interestingly, the RH model is particularly best behaved over the distribution, while the Moupfouma model performs suitably well. Others seem to vary largely from the measured rain rate distribution. Results for the rain rate exceeded for 0.01% of the time agrees with earlier estimates for the cumulative rain rate distribution derived from higher integration-time statistics over this tropical site.