Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation: Fundamentals, Analysis and Design

Chapter 6Performance Evaluation

This chapter describes different methods that can be used to evaluate the performance of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) receivers. We focus on bit-error probability (BEP), symbol-error probability (SEP), and word-error probability (WEP) as performance metrics, as these are often considered relevant in practical systems. We pay special attention to techniques based on the knowledge of the probability density function (PDF) of the L-values we developed in Chapter 5, and in particular to the Gaussian models introduced in Section 5.5.

This chapter is organized as follows. In Section 6.1 we review methods to evaluate the performance for uncoded transmission and in Section 6.2 we study the performance of decoders (i.e., coded transmission). Section 6.3 is devoted to analyzing the pairwise-error probability (PEP), which appears as the key quantity when evaluating coded transmission. Section 6.4 studies the performance of BICM based on the Gaussian approximations of the PDF of the L-values.

6.1 Uncoded Transmission

By uncoded transmission we mean that the channel coding is absent (or is ignored), and thus, the decision on the transmitted symbols is made without taking into account the sequence of symbols (i.e., the constraints on the codewords). We are instead interested in deciding which symbol was transmitted at a given time instant using the ...