PERFORMANCE OF OPTIMUM AND SUBOPTIMUM RECEIVERS IN THE PRESENCE OF IMPULSIVE NOISE MODELED AS AN ALPHA-STABLE PROCESS

Impulsive noise bursts in communication systems are traditionally handled by incorporating in the receiver a limiter which clips the received signal before integration. An empirical justification for this procedure is that it generally causes the signal-to-noise ratio to increase. Recently, very accurate models of impulsive noise were presented, based on the theory of symmetric alpha-stable probability density functions. In this paper, we examine the performance of optimum receivers, designed to detect signals embedded in impulsive noise which is modeled as an infinite variance symmetric alpha-stable process, and compare it against the performance of several suboptimum receivers. As a measure of receiver performance, we compute an asymptotic expression for the probability of error for each receiver and compare it to the probability of error calculated by extensive Monte-Carlo simulation.