Semi-analytical simulation for evaluation of block error rates on fading channels

A semi-analytical simulation method is proposed as a means to improve the efficiency of computer simulation in estimating block error rates in the presence of Doppler fading and additive white Gaussian noise. Frequency non-selective Rayleigh, Ricean and Nakagami fading with diversity combining for binary noncoherent frequency shift keying modulation are considered. The simulation method is based on using the knowledge of the channel and the receiver to determine the conditional probability of bit error analytically; the conditioning is on the correlated fading signal sample energies. In doing so the need to generate noise samples is eliminated and considerable savings in computer simulation time is achieved for high signal-to-noise ratio. Results for the sample size reduction factor compared to the conventional Monte Carlo method are obtained