Utilizing Spectral Level Crossings: An Example Signal-to-Noise Ratio Estimator

Statistical level crossings in a communications paradigm, are typically used in conjunction with estimating a signal's probability of outage over a given channel model. Here the level crossing is examined in the frequency domain of a signal within the context of estimating the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) for linear digital signals. It is shown within that when compared to the Mean-Squared-Error estimator, which uses the same information to calculate the estimate, the Level Crossing approach performs better in reasonable to high SNR and can be cheaper in terms of computation expense to calculate.