Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Introducing noise/ considerable BER

[Marcus D. Leech]

> Keep in mind the old information theorist's adage: if you don't have
> bit errors, you're using too much power! (ok, I don't know how old
> that is; fred harris always quotes it, but he credits someone else
> with it, probably Tony Constantinides).
>
> In other words, we normally design our systems around having bit
> errors, and indeed we recognize that they are unavoidable except under
> extreme SNR conditions. To compensate, you really want to you some
> kind of channel coding. The way things are in our benchmark code, a
> single bit error means that an entire packet is lost.
>
> Tom
In radio systems, I agree--bit errors are a fact of life, and you can 
cope with them either with protocol design, or
  "frame design". The trend in the last couple of decades for radio 
systems has been to incorporate some sort of
  FEC, to reduce the impact of channel distortions--the receiver can 
simply reconstruct from the FEC data, or,
  force a re-transmit.  Systems that use FEC almost always assume that 
there's a higher-layer protocol mechanism
  in place for dealing with packets that were too damaged to decode, 
and thus must be re-transmitted.

On the other hand, there are plenty of extant *wired* communications 
systems in which bit-errors are exceedingly rare.
  The various Ethernet standards for example, assume that bit errors 
aren't common, and there's no FEC (at least at
  100Mbit and 10Mbit levels--I'm not sure about 1000Mbit and 10000Mbit).

The problem is that many communications/networking engineering types who 
are new to radio don't really understand, on a
  visceral level, that the radio channel environment is different from 
wired, not just in degree, but in type, of channel distortions.
  And further, their experience with a channel model for wireless may 
include only simulations, rather than "real world".

My very earliest internet connection at home, back in the mid-to-late 
1980s, was wireless.  Over an amateur-radio 56KBps radio
  link using a "split repeater" on 220Mhz and 432Mhz.  It wasn't a very 
nice environment.  Various RFI issues, hidden-terminal issues.
  Collisions.  Multi-path.  Receiver de-sense.  And a complete lack of 
any FEC.   Given all of that, I'm stunned that LTE and WiFi and all its
  modern friends work at all :-)


--
Marcus Leech
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
http://www.sbrac.org