What is Bit Error Rate (BER)?
The BER is the number of errors occurring for a given number of bits. BER is a measure of the efficiency of an FEC system. For example, a system with an error rate of 1 bit in 100 (10-2) before FEC may have equivalent performance to 1 bit error in 10,000 (10-4) after the application of FEC. • What are the tradeoffs involved in FEC? In general, the greater the number of check bits added, the greater the error-correcting capability of the given code. Of course, after a while, the check bits themselves become the source of errors, and the check bits use up bandwidth that could otherwise be used for data bits. The efficiency of a coding scheme is measured by the number of redundant bits that must be added to detect and correct a given number of errors. FEC systems are classified by the number of bits added to the data stream. For example, in some FEC systems, the number of redundant bits is equal to the number of data bits. This makes the total bit-rate double that of the original data. Th
