Performance of binary nonsymmetric and binary erasure memoryless channels with Viterbi decoding using importance sampling

When estimating the bit error rate (BER) of communications systems using Monte Carlo (MC) simulation, importance sampling (IS) may be a powerful method for reducing simulation runtimes. The paper presents an IS technique combined with error event simulation in order to evaluate efficiently the performance of Viterbi decoding used with a binary nonsymmetric channel and with a binary erasure channel. Two biasing approaches are employed, stationary and nonstationary models. Comparative results between the two models and traditional MC methods are presented.