Large Scale Lightning Electromagnetic Interference to 4G Mobile Communication Network

Lightning is a natural event occurs in nature due to electrical discharges in the air. These electrical discharges emit a wide spectrum of electromagnetic (EM) fields. This EM spectrum includes the frequency of mobile communication networks particularly 4G frequency band at 2.3 GHz which is the interest of this study. The aim of this paper is to investigate the lightning interference effects towards 4G data transmissions. The measurement includes electric field system and protocol that is commonly used by the end-user which is User Datagram Protocol (UDP). The measurement results were evaluated in terms of packet loss, jitter, throughput, and consecutive loss datagrams (CLDs). The significant finding is that, during heavy storm events, there were significant drop in throughput and significant increase in packet loss, jitter, and CLDs. Therefore, it can be concluded that EM radiation emitted by lightning interfered with 4G data transmission to the extent of reducing the overall performance of the 4G network.