An open source implementation of QAM Modulation error measurements in GNU Radio
In particular, we implement a set of probes for the measurement of the Modulation Error Rate (MER) and other measurements that impact on MER, such as system target error (STE), carrier suppression error (CS), amplitude imbalance error (AI), quadrature error (QE) and phase jitter error (PJ).
This set of measurements is based on the definitions of the following document:
- Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB); Measurement guidelines for DVB systems, ETSI, May 1997, pages 27-33.
While the previous document is specific for DTV, the set of measurements proposed in this document is general for any digital modulation system. Considering the estimation procedures implemented in this software, the set of probes can be used on any QAM system.
Notes and examples
We have implemented one GNU Radio block for each measurement: MER, STE,CS, AI, QE and PJ, and one block whose output are all main measurements. The input to each block are the complex samples before the constellation demapping at the receiver and the output is an update of the corresponding measurement for each new sample.
- Examples In the directory gr-mer/examples/ there are two examples mer.grc and mer_all.grc. In both examples we use the hardware impairments block of GNU Radio in order to introduce different errors and test the measurement probes. In the first example we use one probe block for each measurement and in the second one we use the block with all main measurements.
Build instructions
git clone https://github.com/git-artes/gr-mer.git
cd gr-mer
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../
make && sudo make install
If installed for the first time:
sudo ldconfig
IIE Instituto de Ingeniería Eléctrica
Facultad de Ingeniería
Universidad de la República
Montevideo, Uruguay
http://iie.fing.edu.uy/investigacion/grupos/artes/
Please refer to the LICENSE file for contact information and further credits.