Performance of optimum and suboptimum receivers in the presence of impulsive noise modeled as an alpha-stable process

Impulsive noise bursts in communication systems are traditionally handled by incorporating in the receiver a limiter which clips the received signal before integration. An empirical justification for this procedure is that it generally causes the signal-to-noise ratio to increase. Recently, very accurate models of impulsive noise were presented, based on the theory of symmetric /spl alpha/-stable probability density functions. We examine the performance of optimum receivers, designed to detect signals embedded in impulsive noise which is modeled as an infinite variance symmetric /spl alpha/-stable process, and compare it against the performance of several suboptimum receivers. As a measure of receiver performance, we compute an asymptotic expression for the probability of error for each receiver and compare it to the probability of error calculated by extensive Monte-Carlo simulation.<>