A fundamental approach to communications in a hostile environment

The authors outline an approach to detector design to achieve good communications performance in severe channel environments. A transmitted radio signal may undergo distortion, and be modified by interference and noise. By using a stochastic model of the channel, the essential design criterion for optimality namely, maximization of the probability of correct detection, may be proposed from fundamentals, taking into consideration as best as is known, the nature of the noise, interference and distortion. In support of this approach, two examples demonstrate how improved detector performance may be achieved. The examples detail detectors for impulsive noise and narrowband interference based on a simple model