Test Method for Measuring Bit Error Rate of Pulsed Transceivers in Presence of Narrowband Interferers

Rajarajan Senguttuvan,Abhijit Chatterjee,Soumendu Bhattacharya

doi:10.1109/tmtt.2007.904079

Abstract

The popularity of pulse-based transceivers can be attributed to the high information rates that can be achieved in such systems compared to traditional narrowband systems. However, such systems are usually low-power and transmission efficiency is severely affected by the interference signals from other moderate to high-power narrowband transmitters. Hence, during manufacturing, pulse-based systems must be characterized and tested for bit error rate (BER) performance in the presence of narrowband interferers. Usually, at large interference levels, the BER is moderate (10 -4 ) to high (10 -2 ). However, at low interference levels when very few bits are in error, the BER is low (10 -6 - 10 -10 ) and testing for the BER becomes time consuming. We propose a new measurement technique employing sinusoidal pulses such that the BER value obtained is significantly large (10 -3 - 10 -4 ) even at low interference levels. BER values obtained using sinusoidal pulses are highly correlated to the actual BER values. Hence, the actual BER can be accurately estimated in a much smaller time without actually performing the standard test. This method was implemented in hardware using an Altera field-programmable gate-array development board. From the measurements, BER estimation error was less than 3%. In addition, significant reduction (up to 100 x) in test time was obtained using the proposed method.

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