A fast receiver sensitivity identification method for wireless systems

Receiver sensitivity is one of the most important parameters in determining the overall performance of a communication system. Industry has been using exhaustive search in a specified range to identify the achieved receiver sensitivity for wireless devices. Such an exhaustive search scheme is neither efficient in terms of measurement time, nor accurate due to the fixed stepsize. In this paper, we propose a fast sensitivity measurement method for wireless communication systems based on bisection search, where the number of packets needed to estimate the packet error rate (PER) is optimized for the required confidence level. Specifically, we present a new analytic approach to derive the minimum number of packets needed to satisfy the desired confidence level, with the number of test packets further adapted to speed up the measurement of the receiver sensitivity.