Performance of optimum and suboptimum receivers in the presence of impulsive noise modeled as an alpha-stable process

Impulsive noise bursts in communications systems are traditionally handled by incorporating in the receiver limiter which clips the received signal before integration. The justification for this procedure is that it generally causes the signal-to-noise ratio to increase. The authors 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. As a measure of receiver performance, they use an asymptotic expression for the probability of error obtained in the limit of large number of samples