Patent ID: 8467307

Claim:
A method of determining signal quality in a network, the method comprising the steps of: providing a network model comprising interconnections and at least one component model, the component model comprising a gain unit, weighing units, and at least one intermodulation unit for determining a component's gain contribution, frequency dependencies and intermodulation contributions respectively; providing an input signal; determining an output signal using the input signal and the network model; determining a signal quality measure using the input signal and the output signal; wherein: the network model is a model of a cable network, the input signal comprises multiple frequency domain representations of constituent signal components, the output signal comprises a frequency domain representation of a cable network output signal, and the step of determining the output signal involves using the network model to simulate the behavior of the cable network in response to the input signal, and wherein the method further comprises: calculating frequency domain intermodulation components by effecting convolutions of spectra of the constituent signal components of the input signal, and using the frequency domain intermodulation components, in addition to the output signal, to produce the signal quality measure.