JPL's Wireless Communication Reference Website

Chapter: Analog and Digital Transmission
Also: Telephony Systems

BER in cellular networks

The frequency reuse pattern, the propagation models for path loss, shadowing and fading can be combined with the BER characteristics for the modulation method used. The curve presented on this page have been derived from average BER curves for Rayleigh fading with known local-mean powers.

This allows us to find average bit error rates for a user at a worst case location, i.e., at a cell boundary. Note however that average bit error rates do not say so much about link performance. Bits occur in bursts and much depends on the error correction method, the interleaving and block size. Therefore, many operators rely on outage probabilities, instead of average bit error rates.


Figure: Average BER for BPSK, versus average C/I ratio; versus reuse distance and versus cluster size. Rayleigh fading. Shadowing: (a) 0dB, (b) 6 dB and (c) 12 dB.



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