Soft bit error modeling for discrete wireless channels

Soft decision decoding is currently used in many wireless communications systems because of its capability for increasing the coding gain. Soft generative models produce soft error sequences in order to help in the design and evaluation of the performance of many coding schemes and high layer wireless communication protocols. Errors in wireless fading channels are not independent but appear in bursts or clusters. In this paper, we design a soft Markovian based generative model with two embedded processes. The first process combines produced soft error bursts with soft errorfree bursts. Whereas, in the second process new error bursts are created according to the number of soft error clusters in each soft error burst of a reference soft error sequence. The reference soft error sequence is obtained from an enhanced general packet radio service (EGPRS) transmission system. The achieved results show a satisfactory behavior compared with the reference soft error sequence. Copyright 2009 ACM.