An adaptive spatial diversity receiver for correlated non-Gaussian interference and noise

Conventional adaptive receivers designed for Gaussian noise environments can perform very poorly when impulsive noise is present. An adaptive receiver which uses multiple antennas for diversity against fading is developed for operation in an impulsive noise environment. The noise components at each sensor are assumed to be correlated. A mixture of Gaussian distributions is used to model the noise. Model parameters are estimated using iterative procedures derived from the expectation-maximization algorithm. These estimated parameters are then used in a likelihood ratio test to recover the transmitted signals. Monte Carlo simulations are carried out to study the receiver performance. Results show that the performance of the proposed adaptive receiver is very close to that of the optimum receiver with known noise distribution when enough training data is available.