Receivers for Digital Communication in Symmetric Alpha Stable Noise

Wireless communication devices in embedded computational platforms have become increasingly common. As these device become more compact, radio frequency interference (RFI) from other subsystems, such as clocks and buses, becomes more severe and degrades the performance of the communication systems. The interference from these components is impulsive in nature, therefore standard symbol detection techniques based on Gaussian noise statistics are not optimal. In this paper, we investigate methods of mitigating this interference, modeled as symmetric α-stable noise. We propose an approximation to the optimal Bayesian detector and then compare it to suboptimum, but lowercomplexity, pre-filtering techniques. These approaches are seen to provide great benefits over the standard matched filter correlation receiver.