On a problem of Massey

In 1976, Massey introduced a method to compute the confidence interval for the frame error rate of a coded communications system based on the simulation of just a few frame errors [1]. He commented that his approach did not apply to bit error rate confidence intervals, because bit errors are not independent in a coded system. In this paper, we show how to overcome the limitation Massey recognized, and present a method to compute a confidence interval of the bit error rate of a coded communications system from a simulation of bit and frame error events. The proposed interval may be easily computed from the first and second sample moments of the number of bits errors per frame.