MIMO Receiver Design in the Presence of Radio Frequency Interference

Multi-input multi-output (MIMO) receivers have been designed and their communication performance analyzed under the assumption of additive Gaussian noise. Wireless transceivers, however, may be affected by radio frequency interference (RFI) that is well modeled using non-Gaussian impulsive statistics. In this paper, we consider the problem of receiver design for a two transmit, two receive antenna MIMO system in the presence of RFI. First, we show that RFI is well modeled using a bivariate Middleton Class A model and validate the model with measured data. Using this RFI model, we demonstrate that conventional MIMO receivers experience significant degradation in communication performance. Then we derive the maximum likelihood (ML) receiver assuming bivariate Middleton Class A noise. Furthermore, we develop a parameter estimation method for this noise model and propose two sub-optimal ML receivers with reduced computational complexity. Simulations show significant improvement in symbol error rate performance of the proposed techniques over receivers designed assuming additive Gaussian noise.