Performance of 16QAM over Rayleigh fading channel in the presence of non-Gaussian noise

This paper studies the performance of 16QAM over Rayleigh fading channel in the presence of non-Gaussian noise which is modeled as a combination of a white Gaussian process and a shot noise process. A simple approach to estimate the amplitude of fading channel is also presented. Simulation results show that for high SNR region, the system is highly affected by the impulsive noise; for low SNR region, white Gaussian noise dominates. Finally, it is shown that the system performance is strongly influenced by two parameters: the average number of impulsive noise occurring during the detection interval and the power of impulsive noise to Gaussian noise ratio.