An adaptive spatial diversity receiver for non-Gaussian interference and noise

Standard linear diversity combining techniques are not effective in combating fading in the presence of non-Gaussian noise. An adaptive spatial diversity receiver is developed for wireless communication channels with slow, flat fading and additive non-Gaussian noise. The noise is modeled as a mixture of Gaussian distributions, and the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is used to derive estimates for the model parameters. The parameter estimates are used in a generalized likelihood ratio test to reproduce the transmitted signals. The new receiver is shown to be relatively insensitive to errors in the parameter estimates as well as to errors in modeling the actual noise distribution.