Effect of coder/decoder reliability on bit error rate performance of wireless communication systems

This paper examines the effect of coder/decoder circuitry failures on the overall performance of a digital wireless information network. A complete system analysis of the error correcting coding scheme performance must include an evaluation of the reliability of the coder/decoder circuitry because their failures also serve as a source of undetected errors. Included in this study are the parity bit code, Hamming single error correcting and detecting code, and the Reed-Solomon code. Results reveal that for applications that require low bit error rate and operate at low data rates, the reliability of the coding circuitry can play a significant role in determining overall system performance. In fact, for such error and data rates, a simpler coding scheme with higher circuit reliability may actually be more beneficial than a more complex coding scheme with enhanced error correcting ability but with a higher chip failure rate.