On the Quasi-Moment-Method as a Rain Attenuation Prediction Modeling Algorithm

Abstract

A computationally inexpensive, analytically simple, and remarkably efficient rain attenuation prediction algorithm is presented in this paper. The algorithm, here referred to as the Quasi-Moment-Method, has only two main requirements for its implementation. First, rain attenuation measurement data for bit terrestrial or slant paths for the site of interest must be available; and second, a model referred to as the base model, known to have predicted attenuation for any site to a reasonable level of accuracy and whose analytical format can be expressed as a linear combination of its parameters, is also required. An important novelty introduced by the QMM algorithm is a normalization scheme, through which a modelling difficulty concerning exceedance probabilities outside a 1 percent and 100 percent is eliminated. Model validation and performance evaluation using a comprehensive set of data available from the literature clearly demonstrated that the QMM models consistently improved base model performance by more than 90 percent and outperformed all published best fit models with which they were compared.