Low SNR Digital Communication over Certain Additive Non-Gaussian Channels

This paper presents a simple formula for the capacity of a coherent digital communication channel operating near threshold [i.e., with very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)] with additive noise from a certain class of arbitrary but known probability distributions. For the noncoherent threshold channel, the optimun receiver is derived for arbitrary modulations and fading. This receiver is shown to specialize to previously derived canonical froms for unmodulated signals.