Millimeter Wave Attenuation Due to Wind and Heavy Rain in a Tropical Region

Millimeter wave fixed wireless systems in future backhaul and access network applications can be affected by weather conditions. The losses caused by rain attenuation and antenna misalignment due to wind-induced vibrations have greater impacts on the link budget reduction at E-band frequencies and higher. The current International Telecommunications Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) recommendation has been widely used to estimate rain attenuation, and the recent Asia Pacific Telecommunity (APT) report provides the model to estimate the wind-induced attenuation. This article provides the first experimental study of the combined rain and wind effects in a tropical location using both models at a frequency in the E band (74.625 GHz) and a short distance of 150 m. In addition to using wind speeds for attenuation estimation, the setup also provides direct antenna inclination angle measurements using the accelerometer data. This solves the limitation of relying on the wind speed since the wind-induced loss is dependent on the inclination direction. The results show that the current ITU-R model can be used to estimate the attenuation of a short fixed wireless link under heavy rain, and the addition of wind attenuation via the APT model can estimate the worst-case link budget during high wind speeds.