Effect of Sand and Dust Storms on the Coverage of Cellular Networks in the Millimeter Wave Band

Sand and dust storms (SDSs) threaten reliable communications over wireless links at millimeter-wave and terahertz frequency bands, which are expected to be used in future cellular networks. In such weather conditions, besides the radio frequency-dependent path-loss, additional signal attenuation is expected. SDS attenuation is related to visibility, receiver distance to the storm origin point, type of soil, climate conditions, frequency, temperature, and humidity. Leveraging on experimental measurements carried out in previous works, a novel mathematical framework is introduced to include SDS-dependent attenuation in the performance evaluation of stochastic geometric modeled wireless cellular networks in the millimeter-wave band in terms of coverage probability. Numerical results, which are validated by Monte Carlo simulations, are presented to show the effects of different parameters on system performance.