Modulation Constellation Diagrams BER vs. SNR BER vs SNR for M-QAM, M-PSK, QPSk, BPSK, ... 1. What is Bit Error Rate (BER)? The abbreviation BER stands for bit error rate, which indicates how many corrupted bits are received (after the demodulation process) compared to the total number of bits sent in a communication process. It is defined as, In mathematics, BER = (number of bits received in error / total number of transmitted bits) On the other hand, SNR refers to the signal-to-noise power ratio. For ease of calculation, we commonly convert it to dB or decibels. 2. What is Signal the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)? SNR = signal power/noise power (SNR is a ratio of signal power to noise power) SNR (in dB) = 10*log(signal power / noise power) [base 10] For instance, the SNR for a given communication system is 3dB. So, SNR (in ratio) = 10^{SNR (in dB) / 10} = 2 Therefore, in this instance, the signal power i