Signal detection over Rayleigh-fading channels with non-Gaussian noise

The authors deal with the problem of the detection of waveforms over fading channels with impulsive noise, modelled as a compound-Gaussian, possibly correlated process. Starting with the optimum detector, which is actually unsuited to real-time implementation, they propose a sub-optimum scheme, with complexity. Moreover, they show that scheme can be further simplified for the important case of binary frequency shift keying signalling. For this case, a thorough performance assessment is also presented. In particular, the authors consider the case of a slowly fading, frequency selective channel, and give closed-form formulas for the performance: as a case study, they focus on Laplacian noise, and assess the impact of the noise spikiness on the performance. The results indicate that, as for the general Gauss-Gauss case, the performance depends on the energy contrast, as well as on the `time-bandwidth´ product of the useful signal; the suboptimum detector turns out to suffer a very limited loss, as compared to the optimum one, even for extremely low probabilities of error. Additionally, noise spikiness negatively affects the performance of both the optimum and the suboptimum receiver, in the sense that the more impulsive the noise (i.e. the more its statistics deviate from those of Gaussian noise), the worse the performance