Detection Schemes for Weak Signals in First-Order Moving Average of Impulsive Noise

In this paper, the detection of weak signals in additive noise described by the first-order moving average (FOMA) of an impulsive process is considered. Specifically, decision regions of the maximum likelihood (ML) and suboptimum ML (S-ML) detectors are derived in the FOMA noise model, and specific examples of the ML and S-ML decision regions are obtained. The ML and S-ML detectors are employed in the antipodal signaling system and compared in terms of bit error rate in an impulsive noise environment. Numerical results show that the S-ML detector, despite its reduced complexity and simpler structure, exhibits practically the same performance as the optimum ML detector. It is also observed that the performance gap between detectors for FOMA and independent and identically distributed noise becomes larger as the degree of noise impulsiveness increases