Universal Kriging Prediction of Line-of-Sight Microwave Fading

Prediction of the severity of multipath fading is fundamental to the design of point-to-point terrestrial fixed microwave links at frequencies below 10 GHz, but error in this prediction may be significant in countries such as Australia, not represented in the dataset used to generate existing empirical models. We take advantage of recently collected worst-month fading data from Australia, and find new parameters particularly useful in predicting the severe fading experienced in Northern Australia. These parameters are from very irregularly spaced weather stations, so we investigate various interpolation techniques for this situation, including a new version of natural neighbour interpolation. Conventional multipath prediction models are based on ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, but we refine this, taking spatial correlation into account with generalised least squares (GLS) regression. We then demonstrate further improvement in regions well populated by measured data, by employing universal kriging.