BER PREDICTION IN WIRELESS

COMMUNICATION
LINKS WITH APLLICATION TO MULTIMEDIA
NETWORKS

by:

Elad Hever & Elad Kaner

June 2004

Tutor Names:
Pro. Nathan Blaunstein
&
Dr. Shlomo Greenberg
 INTRODUCTION
In the very near future the next generation of
wireless communication, the 3G, will become
integrated part of our life.
The 3G, is envisioned to enable communication
at any time, in any place, with any form, as such,
it will:
– allow global roaming
– provide for wider bandwidths to accommodate
different types of applications
– support packet switching concepts
UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunication System)
UMTS is denoted as the 3G cellular system and
is developed within the framework that has been
defined by the International Telecommunications
Union (ITU).
UMTS has been designed with the objective to
be a system with global coverage.
UMTS will support high bit-rate data services of
144 Kbit/s to 2 Mbit/s depending on the radio
environment (Macro, Micro, and Pico cells).
 Cell types in UMTS:

Global
Satellite

Suburban Urban
In-Building

Pico cell
Micro cell
Macro cell

3rd Generation
 UMTS services:
The data rates that will be offered by the UMTS
standard will make it possible to introduce a
great deal of new applications.
UMTS will be able to support real time services
including multimedia as well as packet data
services.
 Project scope
Transmission of data that requires high
quality is a major issue in wireless networks.
This type of network tends to be error prone
due to certain atmospherically disturbances
(e.g. attenuation, reflection or diffraction),
which affect the transmitted signal.
In this project we examine UMTS channels
and transmission of Multimedia services
through these channels.
 Objective
BER evaluation of W-CDMA in a variety of
channels, such as the additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN), the Rayleigh
fading, and the Rician fading channel.
Simulate the performance of that channels
as a function of signal-to-noise ratio
(SNR).
And finally present how the various kind of
noise can affect the quality of a Real-Time
Multimedia service.
 The System Model
Including:

1) Transmitter

2) Channels

3) Receiver
Transmitter Model
where:

and the transmitted signal is:

The Channels:
We consider three channel models : AWGN, Rayleigh

fading and Rician fading channel.

1) AWGN Channel:

This channel is assumed to corrupt the signal by the

addition of white Gaussian noise, n(t), which denotes
a sample function of the additive white Gaussian
noise process with zero-mean and two-sided power
spectral density
2) Rayleigh Fading Channel:

In this channel, the transfer function assumed for

the m’th user can be represented as:

The random magnitude is assumed to be (iid)

Rayleigh random variables for all users and

sub-carriers, where Rayleigh distribution is:

3) Rician Fading Channel:

If we consider line-of-sight (LOS) with magnitude

b0=const, the transfer function assumed for
the m’th user can be represnted as:

The NLOS magnitude factors are assumed to have

the following Rician distribution:
Receiver Model
System Performance
1)AWGN Channel

In AWGN channel the received signal is:

By the receiver, the decision variable is:

By product of trigonometric functions:

The first term represents the bit of k’th desire user, the

second represents the multiple-access interference

and the third term represents AWGN.

The interference term may be written as:

where:

so

The mean of is:

The variance of is:

The error probability is:

2) Rayleigh fading channel

In Rayleigh channel the received signal is:

By the receiver, the decision variable is:

After simplifiy the equation we get:

The variance of the interference term is:

The mean of the desired data term is:

The variance of the desired data term is:

The variance of the noise term is:

The mean of is:

The variance of is:

and the approximated BER is:

3) Rician fading channel

In Rician channel the decision variable is:

where are Rician distribution with mean of:

The mean of the interference term is:

The variance of the interference term is:

The mean of the desired data term is:

Therefore , the mean of is:

The variance of is:

The approximated BER is:

 Numerical Results
In this section, we analytically simulate the
performance of Multicarrier CDMA
explained above sections.
The simulation was done on MATLAB
platform.
The performance in various channels
The performance in Rayleigh channel for various values of M
The performance in Rayleigh channel for various values of N
The performance in Rician channel for various values of M (K=10)
The performance in Rician channel for various values of N (K=10)
Video performance experiments
In order to comprehend the effect of the various noise
factors on a transmitted video sequence, we created a
simulation environment.
The simulation environment emulate the wireless
channel, as such it has the capability of generating bit
errors, burst errors, packet loss and random bit errors.
The video sequence used in the experiments is the Akiyo
video sequence. This sequence is regarded as a low-
motion sequence, typical for videoconferencing.
We have manipulated the sequence using the MPEG-4
video codec, which was selected as a multimedia
standard for the 3rd generation wireless network.
 Evaluation methods:
Two methods were singled out to measure
the quality of the degraded video
sequence after “transmission” into the
wireless channel:
1. Distortion Measure
2. Subjective evaluation
 Distortion Measure
Generally, the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) is used as a
measure to assess the video degradation due to noise that is
present in the radio channel.
To compute the value of RMSE, the video sequence has to be
divided into grey scale (8 bit) frames of size NxM pixels
Then the original pixel frame is compared with the degraded one:

Where,
f(x, y)1 – is the original frame
f(x, y)2 – is the degraded frame
 Distortion Measure (2)
The common approach to measure quality of
video is to calculate the Peak Signal to Noise
Ratio (PSNR).
 Distortion Measure (3)
Encode with Original video sequence
MPEG-4

Filter -
Simulate noise

Decode with
MPEG-4

Compare original
with degraded
Segmentation By calculation of PSNR Segmentation
 Subjective evaluation
Another important aspect in evaluating the
quality of the video is to perform a
subjective assessment on the resulting
degraded video sequence.
calculated PSNR values do not enlighten
without a person’s view of the difference
between the original and the degraded
video sequence.
 Subjective evaluation (2)
Encode with Original video sequence
MPEG-4

Filter -
Simulate noise

Decode with
MPEG-4

Compare original
with degraded
By subjective assessment

Playback Playback
 Simulation parameters:
Video codec Microsoft MPEG-4 Video codec Reference Software

Encoding rate 400kbps

Video sequence Akiyo/qcif test sequence (300 frames at 30 fps / no audio)

Error Rates Constant BER Burst BER Gaussian BER Packet loss

10^(-3) 10^(-3) 10^(-3)

10^(-4) 10^(-4) 10^(-4)
10^(-5) 10^(-5) 10^(-5)
10^(-6) 10^(-6) 10^(-6)
 Simulation Results:
Constant BER:
As anticipated, both the objective and subjective results became worse when the BER
increased.
Quality severely degrades when the BER becomes larger than 10^(-5).

No or little degradation of the video signal occurs at BER of 10^(-6).

For BER 10^(-5), the signal returns to the “optimal” value of periodically.

BER 10^(-4) BER 10^(-5) BER 10^(-6)

PSNR Results for Constant BER:
Burst errors:
Comparing it with the former case, we can see that errors are more
visible at BER 10^(-5) and 10^(-6) due to sequential errors in the bit
stream.
In real channel we can find this kind of errors due to interferences
that result from stormy weather, when errors appear in “chunks”.
We can also see the different PSNR results:

BER 10^(-4) BER 10^(-5) BER 10^(-6)

PSNR Results for Burst Errors:
Gaussian noise:
Inserting bit errors randomly may cause that all the bit errors are
located beside each other.
Our results show that from the subjective view of point the quality of
the playback was some where between the first case and the
second case.
However the average PSNR results were similar to the PSNR
results of the first case rather to be degraded like the playback did.

BER 10^(-4) BER 10^(-5) BER 10^(-6)

PSNR Results for Gaussian BER:
Summary:
The simulation analysis gives a basic
comprehending what effects error propagation in
wireless mobile channels can have on an
MPEG4 encoded video stream (without error
resilience).
The highly compressed video data is extremely
vulnerable towards transmission error.
Low bit-rate video coding schemes rely on inter-
frame coding to achieve high coding efficiency.
Consequently, the loss of one transmitted video
frame has a major impact on the quality of the
following video frames.
Summary (2):
Of all the services available for the 3rd generation multimedia
systems, transmission of Real-Time video is the most
demanding one in terms of bandwidth and transmission delay.
In addition, this service must also maintain certain QoS
requirements.
The videoconferencing and video streaming services shall
work under conditions of BER 10^(-3), (according to 3GPP).
Bearing this in mind, the simulation results show that the need
for error robustness is enormous for transmissions over
mobile networks.
Error correction methods in form of retransmission may be
used to contend the error propagation in the mobile network,
but in video services like videoconferencing, the requirements
to delay are strict so any form of retransmission is not wanted.
Summary (3):

MPEG4 provide FEC (forward error correction methods),

however, because transmission errors in heterogeneous
mobile channels can range from single bit errors, burst
errors, packet loss or maybe completely loss signal, the
FEC may not be efficient.
The codec also has some error resilience tools, but they
were not tested in our simulation. It may be considered
and experimented in further study.