Block Coding for Impulsive Laplacian Noise

It has been reported that impulsive noise, which can be well modeled by the Laplace distribution, is present in both indoor and outdoor radio environments. The performance of communication systems employing block data transmission in the presence of impulsive Laplacian noise is studied, where analytical expressions for evaluating the block error probability are derived for both hard-decision and soft-decision decoders. Both unfaded and quasi-static Rayleigh fading channels are considered. Computations of the block error probability are also presented for different block sizes and error levels, and the characteristics of block error probabilities are compared for both nonfading and fading scenarios.