Patent ID: 6954507

Claim:
A method for estimating the bit error rate in a radio receiver, which comprises: with an equalizer in a radio receiver, generating reliability information indicating probabilities that a data symbol received by the radio receiver via a radio channel is based on a specific transmitted value; generating the reliability information as soft decision information; with a bit error rate estimator, evaluating the reliability information to obtain bit error rate information regarding a bit error rate of a received signal corresponding to received data symbols; and quantizing the soft decision information into K quantization levels, determining a symbol error rate information item for a corresponding quantization level of each quantized soft decision information item, and dependent thereon, calculating the bit error rate information p for a complete burst in accordance with a formula: p = ∑ k = 0 K - 1 ⁢ ( n k ⁢ p k ) ∑ k = 0 K - 1 ⁢ n k where K denotes a number of the quantization levels, n k denotes a number of estimated symbols in a quantization level k, and p k denotes a symbol error rate of the quantization level k.