Department of Computer Engineering
College of Information Technology
University of Bahrain
ITCE417: Mobile and Wireless Networking
Lab 3: Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) Measurement
Introduction
Signal-to-noise ratio (abbreviated SNR) is a measure used in science and engineering that compares
the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise.
Signal-to-noise ratio is defined as the ratio of the power of a signal (meaningful information) and the
power of background noise (unwanted signal):
where P is average power. Both signal and noise power must be measured at the same or equivalent
points in a system, and within the same system bandwidth.
The noise here is referred to as AWGN (Additive White Gaussian Noise), which can be calculated as: