A Channel Model of Atmospheric Impairment for the Design of Adaptive Coding and Modulation in Stratospheric Communication

Wireless communication in the millimeter frequency bands is subject to severe atmospheric impairment caused by rain and scintillation, which may occasionally cause deep fades and thus needs to be mitigated by an efficient countermeasure such as Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM). In this paper, the authors focus on stratospheric communication and propose appropriate rain and scintillation fading channel models, which they use to describe the conceptual design of adaptive coding and modulation on four reference theoretical ACM schemes. Rain fading is modeled according to the modified DLR segment approach for generating channel attenuation time series, taking into consideration the specifics of stratospheric communication systems, namely the variable elevation angle and different carrier frequency.