BER Analysis for Digital Modulation Schemes under Symmetric Alpha-Stable Noise

A number of important digital modulation schemes including differential phase-shift keying (DPSK), differentially encoded binary phase-shift keying (DEBPSK) and offset quadrature phase-shift keying (OQPSK), are widely used in military communications applications. Conventionally, the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel is employed to model many noisy environments. However, AWGN model is less accurate if the wireless-channel noise process is impulsive in nature. As shown in the previous literatures, symmetric alpha-stable (SaS) process is a more accurate model to characterize realistic wireless environments. Due to lack of closed-form expression derived for probability density function (PDF) of SaS distribution, the general BER expressions for digital modulation schemes have not been derived yet, preventing the derivation of the exact coding gain from being feasible. By employing geometric power involved in zero-order statistics, we create a mapping technique and develop the accurate BER of digital modulation schemes under SaS noise. Our obtained derivations agree well with our simulation results, which provide the benchmark for coding gain evaluation under SaS noise.