Dust & sand (DUSA) storms impact on LEO satellite microwave radio links

Abstract

Satellite telecommunications today present one of the most remarkable opportunities as they enable us to communicate and virtually reach any corner of the world. Great discoveries and developments in this field have enabled us to improve our quality of life. But even as we benefit from this progress, many challenges are encountered as satellite service providers uphold certain quality of service (QoS) levels. Meteorological impairments will always confront the satellite telecommunication links. Arid and semi-arid regions are particularly prone to dust and sand (DUSA) storms posing a looming threat to microwave radio systems reliability. A novel approach to model the dust storms in a three dimensional space has been presented and elaborated here leading to a more efficient attenuation computation and ultimately resulting in perfection of link budget design. A real downlink improvement for a LEO satellite will be re-designed by considering the dust attenuation parameter. An interesting finding is then confirmed that after including the dust attenuation parameter the link margin is found to be in healthy acceptable range and cost effective too. In order to have an efficient communication system and better quality of service (QoS), designers need to consider all the parameters that can impact communication link.