SNR / SINAD / SINR

There are several similar but a little bit different terminology that indicates the ratio
between the wanted signal and the unwanted noise. These terms are confusing almost
everybody. I will try to explain the concept of these terms as much as practical sense
(hopefully). In many case, it would be much easier to understand if you understand on what
purpose (in what context) these are used.

SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio)

SNR stands for 'Signal to Noise Ratio'. It is pretty much self-explanatory and it would not
need much explanation. It is just the ratio of Signal Power and Noise Power as described
below in mathematical form.

SNR can be represented in a graphical form as shown below.

SNR can be either positive and negative value if you represent it in dB scale. Negative SNR
means that Signal power is lower than the noise power. You may think communication
would be impossible in the negative SNR condition, but in reality there is communication
system (technology) which is designed to work mostly in such a condition (e.g, CDMA,
WCDMA).

Why SNR is important ?

It is because SNR is one of the most important indicator to represent signal quality. You
may think Signal Power is the most important factors for signal quality, but in theory Signal
power alone does not mean anything in terms of representing signal quality which help you
predict how much error will happen for your communication system. Even if your signal
power is very strong, you would not get good communication result (low error or no error) if
the noise power is high as well. On the contrary, even if the signal power is very low, you
would get good communication result if the noise power is much lower than the signal
power. This is why in most communication text book or in most of measurement process,
SNR rather than the absolute signal power is used as evaluation/test criteria.
Now let's think of how to measure SNR.
You can get the rough estimate of SNR for a certain signal using a spectrum analyzer, but it
may not be as easy as it sound to measure the accurate SNR since ideally this
measurement should be done at RBW of 1 Hz.
However, if you have to measure SNR in a communication device (not in test equipment),
you cannot use the same method as spectrum analyzer. In that case, the device use very
complicated signal processing algorithm to estimate SNR and the method itself tend to be
different depending on communication technology.

How does SNR impact the performance of a system (especially on the reciever of a
transmission system) ? I think following plots would give you an intuitive understanding of
this. As you see, as SNR decreases the quality of the signal gets poorer (higher noise level).
As a result, Bit Error Rate (BER) will increase and Sensitity will decrease. (Note : Noise
added to this example is AWGN. See AWGN page for the details of the relationship between
SNR and AWGN)

In the following plots, the red dots indicate the ideal constellation with almost no error and
the black dots represents the statistical location of each data points with noises. You can
say, the farther a black dot is from the red dots, the higher probable errors (Bit
Error) occur. In this example, you see three cases of QAM constellation and each case is
exposed to error with different SNR. You would notice that as SNR goes lower the range of
constellation spread goes wider. It means.. with the same modulation scheme .. as SNR
goes lower, the probablity of error goes higher. If you are not familiar with this kind of
concept, please give some more time until you understand the concept.

Now let's describe on the relationship between SNR and Bit Error Rate in more quantitative
way. If you had chance with articles or papers /thesis about communication technology
(especially with anything related to transmitter, reciever technology), you would have seen
the plots as shown at the bottom right. However, if you are new to this area the
interpretation of the plots may not seem to be clear.

Following constellation is based on LTE physical layer specification. The exact quantitative
relation between SNR and exact BER would vary depending on each communication system
design, but overal logic explained here holds true for any system.
First, take a look at the serieas of constellation at the top track. You see the cases of
different modulation (BPSK, QAM, 16QAM, 64QAM, 256 QAM) but same SNR. You would
notice that even with the same SNR you would get higher probability of error as the
modulation depth increases. I hope this sounds clear to you. This top track represents a
single point on a sequance of graphs in the plot at the bottom as indicated by green arrows.
Give some more time to yourself until you clearly understand this.

Now let's decrease SNR by 5 dB. On the top track, you would notice that the range of errors
on constellation gets wider and you see the rate of Bit Error increases on the plot.
Now let's decrease SNR by another 5 dB. On the top track, you would notice that the range
of errors on constellation gets even more wider and you see the rate of Bit Error increases
even more on the plot.
Now let's decrease SNR by another 5 dB. On the top track, you would notice that the range
of errors on constellation gets even more wider and you see the rate of Bit Error increases
even more on the plot.
Now would you see any trend from this example ? Even with exactly same constellation, Bit
Error Rate increase or decrease based on SNR. Many people tend to think that the error
rate is determined by transmitter power and reciever power, but in reality the absolute
power is not important. The thing that is really important is SNR. However, in practice many
people including me take transmitter or reciever power as an indirect indicator for SNR
based on 'BIG ASSUMPTION' that the level of noise is known (even roughly) and the level of
noise does not change when you increase or decrease power. If this BIG ASSUMPTION holds
true, if you increase Transmitter power you may say SNR would be better than the case
when you have low transmitter power. If you have higher recieved power, you may say SNR
would be better than the case when you lower reciever power. But don't blindly apply this
rule for any accurate analysis or troubleshooting. If you are in stuation where you need very
accurate analysis of Bit Error analysis, you need to check SNR of every components on the
signal path. I know this is huge job, this is one of the reason why it take such a long time
with using a lot of high end test equipment for calibrating the high accuracy test equipment
(e.g, Conformance Test system).

As you see above, you might have noticed that SNR is tightly related to BER (Bit Error
Rate). You might have seen a kind of general trend as follows :
i) At the same modulation depth, you will get high BER(Poor Performance) at low
SNR and low BER (Good Performance) at high SNR
 ii) At the same SNR, you will get high BER(Poor Performance) at high modulation
depth and low BER (Good Performance) at low modulation depth
However, in modern communication various kinds of channel coding and error correction
technology is used to correct the certain degree of BER. So if you measure the error rate
after error correction, you may see much lower error rate than the case without error
correction. Usually the error rate after the error correction is measured as a parameter
called BLER (BLock Error Rate). However, even with this kind of error correction process,
you cannot fix all the errors. Therefore, the general trend still holds true at BLER
measurement.
i) At the same modulation depth, you will get high BLER(Poor Performance) at low
SNR and low BLER (Good Performance) at high SNR
ii) At the same SNR, you will get high BLER(Poor Performance) at high modulation
depth and low BLER (Good Performance) at low modulation depth
The exact correlation between SNR and BLER may vary depending on what kind of channel
coding and error correction are used. Following graph shows a good example of SNR vs
BLER for LTE PDSCH (See Ref [2] for the details. this is data for the system supporting only
up to 64 QAM. You would see different plots if you measure with the system supporting 256
QAM).

SINAD (Signal to Noise And Distortion Ratio)

Similar to SNR, there is another indicator called SINAD. It is defined as shown below. It
indicates the ratio of Total energy (Wanted + Unwanted) and Unwanted power. Since the
numerator is the total power in the definition, the value in dB is always positive.
In most of RF area, we use SNR more frequently and in some area like Audio signal analysis
we tend to use SINAD more frequently.

We often get confused by SNR vs SINAD and have difficulties in understanding the
difference between SNR and SINAD. It is well explained in Reference [1] as stated below.

Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR, or sometimes called SNR-without-harmonics) is calculated from

the FFT data the same as SINAD, except that the signal harmonics are excluded from the
calculation, leaving only the noise terms. In practice, it is only necessary to exclude the first
5 harmonics, since they dominate. The SNR plot will degrade at high input frequencies, but
generally not as rapidly as SINAD because of the exclusion of the harmonic terms.

As stated above, the main difference is whether to include 'distortion' in the calculation or
not. Distortion can be more intuitively understood in time domain. If you convert the signal
with distortion into frequency domain, the distortion appears in the form of harmonics. So in
terms of frequency domain, the main difference between SNR and SINAD is whether to
include harmonics in the calculation or not.

SINR (Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio)

SINR stands for Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio and the definition can be illustrated
as below (I hope this single picture can explain everything). Simply put, SINR is the ratio of
the signal (desired signal) and the unwanted noise. The unwanted noise comprises of all the
external interference and internaly generated noise.
Example 1 : SNR (SINR) vs Throughput in a LTE Live Network

Following plot is from the data captured by a drive test tool Azenqos Drive Test tool (AZQ
Android). This plot is automatically generated by AZQ Reporting tool and I just did some
cosmetic touch on the chart.
This is the real measurement showing the correlation between SINR and Throughput. As
you see, as SNR(SINR) goes higher, throughput increases exponentially. In other words, As
SNR decreases, the throughput will decrease exponetially. If network does not change code
rate (i.e, MCS), the throughput decrease would be due to decoding failure at the reciever
(i.e, decoding failure at UE), however in real network UE reports CQI periodically to eNB and
eNB changes the code rate accordinly (i.e, decreasing MCS as CQI value gets lower and this
results in smaller transport block size), so this throughput change would be due to lower
transport block size.
Reference :

[1] Understand SINAD, ENOB, SNR, THD, THD + N, and SFDR so You Don't Get Lost in the
Noise Floor by Walt Kester
[2] NISTIR 7986 - LTE Physical Layer Performance Analysis by Wen-Bin Yang, Michael
Souryal