On Single-Carrier Communication in Additive White Symmetric Alpha-Stable Noise

In this paper we analyze design aspects of a single-carrier digital communications receiver in the presence of impulsive noise. We use the additive white symmetric α-stable noise (AWSαSN) to model the channel noise. By introducing passband sampling, efficient constellations and suitable baseband detectors, we show that the uncoded error performance of the conventional (linear) receiver can be enhanced given the real and imaginary components of the transmitted symbol are decoded separately. The performance may be improved further by sacrificing the linearity of the system. Various non-linear estimation and joint-detection schemes are discussed and their error performance analyzed. It is shown that if the receiver bandwidth is large enough, impulsive noise may be effectively countered in a single-carrier communications system.