A measurement method of interfering signals to determine the radio communication performance

Interfering signals collocated to a radio communication system can degrade the system performance severely. To quantify this degradation by measuring the interfering signal is a difficult issue. Traditionally, the average interference power (the root mean square (RMS) value of the interfering signal) is measured and used as a measure of the impact on a digital radio receiver. However, it is well-know that this measure may result in substantial underestimation of the degradation in terms of the bit error probability (BEP) of the radio receiver. To address this problem, an impulsiveness correction factor (ICF) has earlier been proposed to adjust for these errors. In this paper, we describe a new method to derive this correction factor by means of simple measurements with traditionally standard detectors. It is shown that the correction factor can be derived by means of the measured Amplitude Probability Distribution (APD) or alternatively by using peak and RMS detectors. By using the proposed methods underestimation of the BEP is avoided.