Modeling millimeter wave tropospheric attenuations for UAS and terrestrial aviation communications

摘要

The prevalence of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) brings strict demands on reliable communication links for control and non-payload communication (CNPC). Millimeter wave (mmWave) links for UAS, and also for various airport links, are seeing new interest for future applications, in part due to the extremely large available bandwidths at these frequencies. In these bands, attenuation must be accurately quantified to ensure appropriate link design for reliability. Tropospheric attenuation is modeled statistically, and the most widely used model comes from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). The ITU model relies on climate data and averages, and although it can account for variabilities, little has been reported on extreme conditions and use of regional weather data. In this paper, we investigate tropospheric attenuation in three potential mmWave bands (30, 60, and 90 GHz) for short range aviation links. Results are based upon the ITU-R time series model from Recommendations P.530 and P.1853 for link distances from 20 m to 5 km at three representative climatic locations: Cleveland, OH, Columbia, SC, and Miami, FL. Worst month attenuation variability analysis results are provided to illustrate the severity of tropospheric attenuation in these mmWave bands.