Quasi-Analytical Simulation Method for Estimating the Error Probability of Star Domain Decoders

Evaluating the block error rate of a digital communication system is usually done using the Monte Carlo (MC) simulation method. The main drawback of the Monte Carlo method is the need of a huge sample size for estimating low error rates. Other methods commonly used are the importance sampling technique and the quasi-analytical method. This paper introduces the metric star domain decoder model and shows that many practical decoders fall into this category. The main result is the introduction of a novel SNR-invariant quasi-analytical technique for estimating the block error rate of a communication link over the geodesic channel model (a generalization of a vast number of commonly used channels, including binary symmetric channel, BEC, and AWGN channel) with a metric star domain decoder used at the receiver. This technique outperforms the Monte Carlo and importance sampling methods in both accuracy and speed. It is shown that our quasi-analytical method is at least 10
³
times faster than MC and 10 times faster than IS for the same accuracy.