Evaluation of Atmospheric Variability and Multipath Fade Statistics for Microwave Communication Applications over Akure, Nigeria

Abstract

The presence of multipath fading is one of the factors that contribute greatly to the performance of mm-Waves. This work considers the atmospheric factors and the multipath fade distribution over the region of Akure, Nigeria, using atmospheric measurements obtained through the Davis 6162 Vantage Pro2 weather station from January 2021 to December 2023. The geo-climatic factor and the fade depth exceedance probability distributions have been obtained for frequencies ranging from zero to 100 GHz with a path length of 5 km. The findings show a sudden increase in the fade depth when the frequency increases until about 16 GHz. Moreover, the effect of path length is quite noticeable on the amount of fade depth exceeded 0.01 percent of the time since there will be more fade depths when the path length increases due to several reflection effects owing to the bending effect of the radio wave from the refractivity gradient. It was found from this study that the month of January experienced the maximum outage probability rate with a geo-climatic factor of 1.81E-04, which can be considered ducting conditions. This suggests that there is a variation in atmospheric parameters like temperature, pressure, and moisture levels during different seasons and at different times of day, resulting in different fade depths.