Optimal detection of QAM in a man-made noise environment

It is known that in the personal communication systems environment, additive noise is not Gaussian. Experimental studies show that this type of noise obeys the class A Middleton man-made noise statistics. The influence of such noise is very severe on the probability error rate for a matched filter detector. To improve the detection performance, a non-linear detector should be used. This structure is based on the maximum likelihood approach which exploits multiple samples of the incoming signal. The improvement has been established by Spaulding and Middleton (1977) for the binary case. This paper generalizes this approach to M-ary signal detection, namely M-QAM, which is the most popular scheme in practice