Confidence intervals for simulations using Reed-Solomon codes

The minimum length confidence interval (CI) for the decoded binary symbol error probability is considered for a Monte Carlo communication system simulation which includes a Reed-Solomon (RS) code. The binary errors at the demodulator output are assumed to be independent with probability P/sub ch/, and the RS decoder is assumed to be an errors-only, incomplete (bounded distance) decoder with decoded bit error probability P/sub c,b/. Let z denote the number of codewords sent through the channel for a simulation trial and let random variable (RV) N/sub z/ be the number of errors observed to occur at the RS decoder output. To compute the CI, the discrete probability density function (pdf) .< >