A saddle-point based approach for semi-analytical performance evaluation of a digital communication system

Nowadays, it has become difficult to obtain the expected performance of a digital communication system using the Monte Carlo simulation method. This is due to advanced technologies used in the transmitter and the receiver. In this paper, we propose a new semi-analytical approach for deriving the error probability. It combines the saddle-point approximation and bootstrap technique for estimating the probability density function. Simulation results show that the obtained semi-analytical error probability is close to that measured with Monte Carlo simulation and provides a significant gain in terms of computing time.