Bit Error Rate Tester

[trigeek]

Hello.  I am looking to create a bit error rate tester (BERT) with LabVIEW.  I would like to send out a psuedo random sequence of 1's and 0's out of a COM port, do some processing, and then bring data back into a COM port.  I have that part down fine.  I would like to know if anyone has any ideas about how to compare the sent data and the received data, and also how to calculate the bit error rate.  I am currently using LabVIEW 7.0, but would also like to be able to implement this in LabVIEW 4.0.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[falkpl]

One quick method of comparing two bit strings is to xor them, this way you will get a new string of binary (or Boolean) data where you get a 1 (true) for any value which was not the same, summing all these true values and dividing by the total number of bits will give an indication of the fraction of bits which deviated between sent and returned bits.  As for the strict def'n of BER I haven't had to implement this test ever so I cant answer that definitely.

Paul

[falkpl]

One quick method of comparing two bit strings is to xor them, this way you will get a new string of binary (or Boolean) data where you get a 1 (true) for any value which was not the same, summing all these true values and dividing by the total number of bits will give an indication of the fraction of bits which deviated between sent and returned bits.  As for the strict def'n of BER I haven't had to implement this test ever so I cant answer that definitely.

Paul

[Dennis_Knutson]

The BER is the number of errors divided by the total number of bits as a percentage. The rate is expressed as 10 to the negative power. For example, 4 errors out of 100,000 bits sent would be a bit error rate of 4 x 10^-5 .