Path quality analysis: In a communicationspath, an analysis that (a) includes the overall evaluation of the component quality measures, the individual link quality measures, and the aggregate path quality measures, and (b) is performed by evaluating communications parameters, such as bit error ratio, signal-plus-noise-plus-distortion to noise-plus-distortion ratio, and spectral distortion.
... for generalizations) with a being non-zero. These solutions are also called the roots of the equation. The formula reads
<math>
x=\frac{-b \pm \sqrt ...