Circuit for statistical estimation of BER and SNR in telecommunications

The key parameters that determine channel performance in telecommunications are bit error rate, Q-factor, signal to noise ratio and noise factor. Channel performance depends on signal susceptibility to attenuation, noise, jitter and other interferences in the propagating medium. Typical non-service affecting methods that estimate the channel performance rely on error detecting and correcting codes that have limited error detection capability and require relatively long time. In this paper, we review the statistical estimation of signal performance parameters. Based on this, we describe the functional block of a circuit that continuously estimates BER, SNR, Q-factor and NF at each port without service interruption. Our method is based on statistical sampling and therefore estimates are made in very short intervals.