Baseband characterization of additive white symmetric α-stable noise

The performance of conventional digital communication schemes in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) has been widely studied and optimized. The efficiency of these systems, however, is severely hampered if the channel noise is impulsive. Impulsive noise is non-Gaussian in nature and is modeled well by random processes based on heavy-tailed symmetric α-stable (SαS) distributions. If the noise samples are identical and mutually independent, the additive white SαS noise (AWSαSN) model is used to simulate the channel. As performance is conventionally analyzed at the baseband level, we investigate characteristics of complex baseband noise derived from passband AWSαSN. The baseband noise samples are shown to be mutually independent with identical distribution. The bivariate distribution of each complex noise sample takes on a star-like geometrical configuration. We also investigate the baseband scale parameter as a function of the noise impulsiveness and system parameters.