Confidence Intervals for the Bit Error Rate of Coded Communications Systems

The bit error rate (BER) is a wellunderstood metric for measuring communications system performance. When a system is not amenable to analytical performance analysis, a Monte Carlo simulation is often used to determine the performance. In such simulations, it is necessary to compute a 95% (or other percent) confidence interval to establish the statistical significance of the simulation run, or to determine how long to run a simulation to achieve the desired accuracy.