Near optimal detection of signals in impulsive noise modeled with a symmetric /spl alpha/-stable distribution

There has been great interest in symmetric /spl alpha/-stable distributions which have proved to be very good models for impulsive noise. However, most of the classical non-Gaussian receiver design techniques cannot be extended to the symmetric /spl alpha/-stable noise case since these techniques require an explicit compact analytical form for the probability density function (PDF) of the noise distribution which /spl alpha/-stable distributions do not possess. A new analytical representation has been suggested for the symmetric /spl alpha/-stable PDF which is based on scale mixtures of Gaussians. Based on this new analytical representation, this paper introduces a novel near-optimal receiver for the detection of signals in symmetric /spl alpha/-stable noise. The performance of the new receiver is very close to the locally optimum receiver and is significantly better than the performance of previously suggested sub-optimum receivers. The new technique has important potential in radar, sonar, and other applications.