Wireless Systems An efficient technique to estimate the realisation bit error rate of multiband OFDM based UWB systems

In this paper, we present a simple method to estimate the realisation bit error rate (RBER) of a multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based ultra-wide band (UWB) system. Under time-varying channels, error event based BER estimation of convolutionally encoded systems requires the knowledge of error events in the Viterbi decoding. In this work, we show that the upper-bound of instantaneous outage capacity is a function of the percentage of subcarriers, whose signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio is less than a predefined outage threshold which we call as realisation outage ratio (ROR). Simulation results reveal that the RBER of the channel realisations and their corresponding ROR are highly correlated at an optimally selected outage threshold. Using this correlation, we form a simple mathematical model between ROR and RBER and obtain quite accurate and consistent RBER estimates with respect to the error event based RBER estimates and the empirical RBER simulation results. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.