Probability of error for digital systems with inaccurately known interference (Corresp.)

The "moment bound theory" is known to provide a useful technique to evaluate error probabilities for digital communication systems in the presence of additive noise and random interference. In this correspondence this theory is extended to the case where the moments of the interference are known only within certain intervals, and upper and lower bounds to the error probabilities are sought. A situation like this can occur in several applications. For example, the exact statistics of the interference may not be known, and only estimates of the first moments may be available. Another example arises when the signal is disturbed by intersymbol interference generated by a channel impulse response whose samples are known only in a certain interval--either because they have been measured with finite accuracy, or because we want to estimate the error probability for a class of channel impulse responses. Several numerical examples are provided which show the range of applicability of this technique.