A statistical bit error generator for emulation of complex forward error correction schemes

Abstract

Forward error correction (FEC schemes are generally used in wireless communication systems to maintain an acceptable quality of service. Various models have been proposed in literature to predict the end-to-end quality of wireless video systems. However, most of these models utilize simplistic error generators which do not accurately represent any practical wireless channel. A more accurate way is to evaluate the quality of a video system using Monte Carlo techniques. However these necessitate huge computational times, making these methods unpractical. This paper proposes an alternative method that can be used in modeling of complex communications systems with minimal computational time. The proposed three random variable method was used to model two FEC schemes adopted by the digital video broadcasting (DVB) standard. Simulation results confirm that this method closely matches the performance of the considered communication systems in both bit error rate (BER) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR).