Performance of DS/SSMA communications in impulsive channels. II. Hard-limiting correlation receivers

For pt.I see ibid., vol.COM-35, no.11, p.1179-88 (1987). In part I it was demonstrated that impulsive channel noise can be a serious detriment to the performance of direct-sequence spread-spectrum multiple-access (DS/SSMA) communications when conventional linear correlation reception is used. Here, a hard-limiting correlator as an alternative for reception of multiple-access transmission in impulsive channels is considered. For K asynchronous binary PSK DS/SSMA users sharing a linear channel corrupted by impulsive noise that is modeled at the output of the front-end filter of the receiver, techniques are developed for analyzing bit error probabilities of this hard-limiting receiver by exact computation for short spreading sequences, by approximation for longer spreading sequences, and by asymptotic limits for infinitely long spreading sequences. Performance is compared to that of the linear correlator under a variety of conditions, showing that hard-limiting correlation reception can offer substantial improvement over conventional systems in impulsive channels. However, the linear receiver is more effective against multiple-access noise only, and so a tradeoff emerges between rejection of impulsive noise and rejection of multiple-access interference