A method to analyze performance of digital connections

A comprehensive performance analysis method that models, at bit level, the error performance of individual links in an end-to-end connection is presented. The link model accounts for the burst-error behaviour of each individual link. A method to concatenate several individual links and extract a model for the end-to-end connection is given. This resulting end-to-end model can be used to calculate performance measures such as bit error rate and block error rate for any given block size. A procedure to compute the probability distribution of errors within a specific block is also developed. Finally, a method to compute the probability distribution of blocks having a certain error rate over a given period of time is presented. The utility and power of the model are illustrated with the help of an example connection