Parameter estimation for a burst-noise channel

The authors describe the estimation of the parameters of the Gilbert and Gilbert-Elliott models for burst-noise channels. Two estimation techniques are compared. The first estimation technique was proposed by Gilbert (1960) and is found to yield good estimates of the model parameters when the error sequences are long. The second estimation technique applies the theory of hidden Markov models to the parameter estimation problem. This technique does not require error sequences as long as those for Gilbert´s technique and computes estimates with a lower variance. The second estimation technique is, however, more complex than Gilbert´s approach