Novel Relations between the Ergodic Capacity and the Average Bit Error Rate

TL;DR

This paper introduces new mathematical relations linking ergodic capacity and average bit error rate in wireless systems, enabling performance analysis without detailed channel statistics.

Contribution

It proposes the first explicit relations between ergodic capacity and bit error rate for systems with binary modulation over generalized fading channels.

Findings

Relations can be expressed without detailed channel models

Validated with classical examples

Useful for performance comparison and system design

Abstract

Ergodic capacity and average bit error rate have been widely used to compare the performance of different wireless communication systems. As such recent scientific research and studies revealed strong impact of designing and implementing wireless technologies based on these two performance indicators. However and to the best of our knowledge, the direct links between these two performance indicators have not been explicitly proposed in the literature so far. In this paper, we propose novel relations between the ergodic capacity and the average bit error rate of an overall communication system using binary modulation schemes for signaling with a limited bandwidth and operating over generalized fading channels. More specifically, we show that these two performance measures can be represented in terms of each other, without the need to know the exact end-to-end statistical characterization of the communication channel. We validate the correctness and accuracy of our newly proposed relations and illustrated their usefulness by considering some classical examples.