We are usually asked about the full system bit rate. However, we use channel encoding in practical systems, for example conventional coding with rate $(1/3)$. My question is about the full system bit rate in such system which employs channel coding. Should it be calculated including the coding bits or after extracting the code bits? I mean if we have system whose bit rate of $12bps$ and employs channel encoding of rate $(1/3)$. Should the bit rate be $12bps$ or $4bps$ since the other $8$ bits are used for coding?
1 Answer
Both indicators are used. It depends what you mean in speaking of your indicators.
One of common usages is to compare systems where we use indicators of the same type. For example,
- to compare 5G NR and LTE RANs, we usually use max throughput which is defined as the multiplication of number of antennas, number of subcarriers and QAM order per subframe. There is no error probability here.
- To compare channel decoders e.g. iterative belief propagation LDPC decoder and Ordered Statistic decoder, it does not make sense anymore if error probability is ignored and, therefore, the code dimension (number of bits before encoding) must be used.
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$\begingroup$ Thank you for your clarification. As I understood, it means the data rate is the transmitted data bits before encoder. $\endgroup$ Jul 29, 2020 at 14:00
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1$\begingroup$ No, you must specify the type of data in speaking of data rate. Without specifying, we "usually" mean the rate of bits at baseband frontend, which is after encoder, because this number is bigger and looks better for marketing purpose. $\endgroup$– AlexTPJul 29, 2020 at 14:08