Error floor in cordless communications systems-an overview of the work in COST 231

We give an overview of the work of COST 231 on the "error floor", i.e. errors introduced by the time dispersion of the mobile radio channel. The error floor depends mainly on the RMS delay spread S and on the sampling scheme; the error probability is in general K/spl middot/(S/T)/sup 2/, where T is the bit length. For fixed sampling, the proportionality constant K is about 0.5, and depends only weakly on the filters. For adaptive sampling, K is one or more orders of magnitude smaller, depending strongly on the filters in the system. Errors occur in a "bursty" way in the fading dips.