The effectiveness of link outage tolerance as a Fade Mitigation Technique

Inhalt:
Some services which are provided by satellite, or which may in future by provided by High-Altitude Platform (HAP) networks, can be configured to tolerate short link outages without loss of service. If the shortest fades can be ‘bridged’, this will reduce the failure rate of services. The two most common causes of outage in mm-wave links, which require line-of-sight propagation, direct from Satellites or High-Altitude Platforms (HAPs) to a moving train are heavy rain and tunnels. It is shown that ability to tolerate outages of up to 30 minutes enables the delivery of content at 99.9% availability in an extremely rainy location such as Singapore, a service which would otherwise not be possible. The improvements offered to services on trains by exploiting antenna site diversity and caching are also evaluated.