Rain Resilience of MIMO Ground Stations for LEO Constellations

Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) is a promising solution to overcome the current feeder bottleneck in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. Beyond its higher spectral efficiency, the distributed architecture of MIMO ground stations adds rain robustness to the link, thus improving its availability. This work analyzes the advantages of MIMO for short-range diversity, focusing on the joint probability of rain attenuation. A numerical comparison is performed using MIMO with different antennas counts and a conventional Single-Input Single-Output (SISO) setup with backup antenna. Results demonstrate that MIMO improves the link robustness against rain impairments.