Galois field data sources for simulation of m-ary systems

Sources based on Galois fields are introduced and compared to binary ones in terms of the mean and variability of the resulting bit error rate (BER) estimate. It is found that the use of Galois field data sources for Monte-Carlo simulation of m-ary communications systems largely eliminates HER estimate variability caused by the commonly used binary data sources. Such variability is important when nonlinearities or multipath interference are present, since some of the constellation points cause higher probabilities of error than others. It has been generally assumed that enough symbols will be simulated so that the central limit theorem will cause insignificant variance in results. This is found not the case for m-ary systems in the presence of multipath interference. It is also found that it is important to map separate Galois field data sources to each sub-carrier in the case of multicarrier m-ary systems such as 16-QAM-OFDM