Irreducible error performance of a digital portable communication system in a controlled time-dispersion indoor channel

The authors investigated experimentally, analytically, and by simulation the irreducible errors such as error floor for high signal-to-noise ratio that are introduced by time dispersion in a slowly fading Rayleigh channel. A multipath indoor propagation environment with controlled delay spread was created to validate this approach. The system is close to the Digital European Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) standard with 1 Mb/s GMSK-modulated signals being transmitted in FDM/TDMA/TDD format and received by a differential direct-conversion receiver. The measured and simulated error probability floor is Pe≈5×10^-3 as a consequence of delay spread that is 10% of the bit length. This value is approximated by a closed-form analytical description of phase jitter due to large group delay bursts. Simulation results obtained previously by others for comparable cases are partially corroborated and partially disproved