Bit error rate estimation techniques for digital land mobile radios

Two methods are shown to provide reliable estimates of the raw channel BER (bit error rate) over channels which are characterized as having Rayleigh fading. In the first method, it is shown that pseudorandom noise sequences when interleaved within the transmitted data can be used to compute an autocorrelation parameter in the receiver from which the channel BER may be estimated. The accuracy of this estimate is shown to be a function of the sequence length for a given channel signal-to-noise ratio. In the second method, it is shown that if symbol interleaving is used in a Reed-Solomon-based system, side information from bounded distance decoders can be used to provide an estimate of the raw channel BER. Further, it is shown that decoder failure and error events do not significantly affect this BER estimate