TETRASIM: a simulation software package for analyzing the TETRA receiver performance

TETRA (Trans-European Trunked RAdio) is a new digital mobile radio standard currently being defined by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute). It will offer a wide range of services and facilities with a greater spectrum efficiency compared to the present analog PMR (private mobile radio) systems. This paper reports a description of the main features of a software package developed according to TETRA specifications and the simulation results obtained for some of the traffic channels specified by the standard, in terms of BER (bit error rate). As far as the simulated receiver scheme is concerned, the characteristics of the equivalent low-pass filters and the adopted synchronization technique are reported. The simulated demodulator uses a differential detection scheme with soft decision outputs in the case of coded channels.