Decision Boundary Evaluation of Optimum and Suboptimum Detectors in Class-A Interference

The Middleton Class-A (MCA) model is one of the most accepted models for narrow-band impulsive interference superimposed to additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The MCA density consists of a weighted linear combination of infinite Gaussian densities, which leads to a non-tractable form of the optimum detector. To reduce the receiver complexity, one can start with a two-term approximation of the MCA model, which has only two noise states (Gaussian and impulsive state). Our objective is to introduce a simple method to estimate the noise state at the receiver and accordingly, reduce the complexity of the optimum detector. Furthermore, we show for the first time how the decision boundaries of binary signals in MCA noise should look like. In this context, we provide a new analysis of the behavior of many suboptimum detectors such as a linear detector, a locally optimum detector (LOD), and a clipping detector. Based on this analysis, we insert a new clipping threshold for the clipping detector, which significantly improves the bit-error rate performance.