Evaluation of average bit error rate for wireless networks with alpha-stable interference

The performance of a digital wireless network that operates in a Rayleigh fading environment in the presence of Gaussian noise and heavy-tailed impulsive interference that can be modelled by an α-stable process is investigated. Such wireless networks include ad hoc or cognitive radio networks that operate in an unbounded fading/shadowing environment with a Poisson interference field. For the system under consideration, a novel closed-form expression for the average bit error probability of digital modulation schemes, valid for any arbitrary real values of the characteristic exponent, α, is derived. The validity of the proposed formulation is attested through Monte Carlo simulation results.