Parameter Estimation of In-City Frontal Rainfall Propagation

Modern infrastructures support smart-city operations, which are based on short millimeter-waves wireless links connected by a dense network. These links are sensitive to hydrometeors, and their signals attenuated by rain. In this study, we demonstrate that standard signal-level measurements being collected by the network can be used to estimate the movement of an ongoing storm. Parameters characterizing the movements of the frontal rain cell, as its velocity and direction, can be accurately estimated. We first estimate the differential time of arrival of the attenuated signals between pairs of links, from which we extract the parameters of interest. We demonstrate our results using actual measurements from an operating system in the city of Rehovot, Israel.