The residual bit error rate (RBER) is a receive quality metric in

digital transmission Data transmission and data reception or, more broadly, data communication or digital communications is the transfer and reception of data in the form of a digital bitstream or a digitized analog signal transmitted over a point-to-point or ...

, one of several used to quantify the accuracy of the received data.

Overview

In digital transmission schemes, including cellular telephony systems such as

GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a standard developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to describe the protocols for second-generation ( 2G) digital cellular networks used by mobile devices such ...

, a certain percentage of received data will be detected as containing errors, and will be discarded. The likelihood that a particular

bit The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communications. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represente ...

will be detected as erroneous is the

bit error rate In digital transmission, the number of bit errors is the number of received bits of a data stream over a communication channel that have been altered due to noise, interference, distortion or bit synchronization errors. The bit error rate (BER) ...

. The RBER characterizes the likelihood that a given bit will be erroneous but will not be detected as such

Applications

When digital communication systems are being designed, the maximum acceptable residual bit error rate can be used, along with other quality metrics, to calculate the minimum acceptable

signal-to-noise ratio Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR or S/N) is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. SNR is defined as the ratio of signal power to the noise power, often expressed in de ...

in the system. This in turn provides minimum requirements for the physical and electronic design of the transmitter and receiver.

References

Error detection and correction {{measurement-stub