Bit error rate

In digital transmission, the number of bit errors is the number of received bits of a data stream over a communication channel that have been altered due to noise, interference, distortion or bit synchronization errors.

Bit error ratio is a unitless performance measure, often expressed as a percentage.

This estimate is accurate for a long time interval and a high number of bit errors.

A packet is declared incorrect if at least one bit is erroneous.

The expectation value of the PER is denoted packet error probability pp, which for a data packet length of N bits can be expressed as assuming that the bit errors are independent of each other.

For small bit error probabilities and large data packets, this is approximately Similar measurements can be carried out for the transmission of frames, blocks, or symbols.

The above expression can be rearranged to express the corresponding BER (pe) as a function of the PER (pp) and the data packet length N in bits: In a communication system, the receiver side BER may be affected by transmission channel noise, interference, distortion, bit synchronization problems, attenuation, wireless multipath fading, etc.

The BER may be improved by choosing a strong signal strength (unless this causes cross-talk and more bit errors), by choosing a slow and robust modulation scheme or line coding scheme, and by applying channel coding schemes such as redundant forward error correction codes.

The transmission BER is the number of detected bits that are incorrect before error correction, divided by the total number of transferred bits (including redundant error codes).

The information BER, approximately equal to the decoding error probability, is the number of decoded bits that remain incorrect after the error correction, divided by the total number of decoded bits (the useful information).

The information BER is affected by the strength of the forward error correction code.

The BER may be evaluated using stochastic (Monte Carlo) computer simulations.

Examples of simple channel models used in information theory are: A worst-case scenario is a completely random channel, where noise totally dominates over the useful signal.

This results in a transmission BER of 50% (provided that a Bernoulli binary data source and a binary symmetrical channel are assumed, see below).

In a noisy channel, the BER is often expressed as a function of the normalized carrier-to-noise ratio measure denoted Eb/N0, (energy per bit to noise power spectral density ratio), or Es/N0 (energy per modulation symbol to noise spectral density).

For example, in the case of BPSK modulation and AWGN channel, the BER as function of the Eb/N0 is given by:

[2] People usually plot the BER curves to describe the performance of a digital communication system.

Measuring the bit error ratio helps people choose the appropriate forward error correction codes.

Since most such codes correct only bit-flips, but not bit-insertions or bit-deletions, the Hamming distance metric is the appropriate way to measure the number of bit errors.

Many FEC coders also continuously measure the current BER.

A more general way of measuring the number of bit errors is the Levenshtein distance.

The Levenshtein distance measurement is more appropriate for measuring raw channel performance before frame synchronization, and when using error correction codes designed to correct bit-insertions and bit-deletions, such as Marker Codes and Watermark Codes.

[3] The BER is the likelihood of a bit misinterpretation due to electrical noise

Knowing that the noise has a bilateral spectral density

Returning to BER, we have the likelihood of a bit misinterpretation

±§ BERT or bit error rate test is a testing method for digital communication circuits that uses predetermined stress patterns consisting of a sequence of logical ones and zeros generated by a test pattern generator.

BERTs are typically stand-alone specialised instruments, but can be personal computer–based.

In use, the number of errors, if any, are counted and presented as a ratio such as 1 in 1,000,000, or 1 in 1e06.

A bit error rate tester (BERT), also known as a "bit error ratio tester"[4] or bit error rate test solution (BERTs) is electronic test equipment used to test the quality of signal transmission of single components or complete systems.

The main building blocks of a BERT are: This article incorporates public domain material from Federal Standard 1037C.