Small and large scale site diversity experiment at Ka-band in the south of France

Since April 2011, ONERA has been operating in Toulouse, France, a beacon receiver able to receive the 20.199GHz beacon signal of ASTRA 3B. From June 2013 to December 2013, ONERA and CNES successively deployed in the South of France four more beacon receivers in order to characterize the space-time behaviour of the propagation channel at Ka-band. This Site Diversity configuration is of great interest for the development of future high data rate satellite services as it efficiently mitigates severe tropospheric propagation impairments, in particular rain attenuation which is the major issue. The ONERA-CNES Ka-band site diversity experiment consists of three beacon receivers deployed in the area of Toulouse with site separation between 16 and 26km, and two additional beacon receivers at 140km and 300km from Toulouse. This paper aims at providing a complete description of the experimental set-up and the statistical results of the campaign from July 2013 to December 2014. The Complementary Cumulative Distribution Functions (CCDF) of rain attenuation on each site and the Joint Distributions for several pairs of radio links are illustrated. Some comparisons of the measured Diversity Gain with two state-of-the-art prediction models are also presented. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.