BER for PAM4 signal available in .mat file

I want to calculate the BER/ bath tub curve of a measured PAM4 signal available as .mat file. I was looking into berawg, but it need E0Nb and I am not sure where to get that.

.mat file for the PAM4 signal is attached with this mail.

Followind code has been used to see eye diagram for the provided data.

eyediagram(PAM4,200);

plot of PAM4 data and eye diagram pngs are attached.

Answer 1

[Soumya]

Hi Mohit,

The Bit Error Rate (BER) is the number of bit errors divided by the total number of transmitted bits during an observation time interval.

The “berawgn” function as stated in the documentation returns the bit error rate (BER) and symbol error rate (SER) in an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel for uncoded data using various modulation schemes. The first input argument, “EbNo”, is the ratio of bit energy to noise power spectral density in dB (Eb/N0).

ber = berawgn(EbNo,modtype,M)

You can define the “EbNo” manually in your script and use this function to get the bit error rate.

The following code is an example on how to get on with that:

EbNo = 10; 
snr = convertSNR(EbNo,'ebno',samplespersymbol=sps,bitspersymbol=k);

Some additional information for the berawgn function is linked in the following MATLAB documentation:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/comm/ref/berawgn.html

Another method that seems appropriate in your case is to extract the values from the  .MAT  file, compare the received bits with the transmitted bits, count the number of bit errors, and calculate the BER using the definition formula.

noErr = sum(transmittedData ~= receivedData); 
noBits = length(transmittedData); 
BER = noErr / noBits;

I hope this offers some valuable insights!