Performance Analysis of Diversity Combining over Rayleigh Fading Channels with Impulsive Noise

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance analysis of diversity combining over flat fading channels subject to additive impulsive noise. Specifically, the impulsive noise follows the symmetric α-stable (SαS) distribution. Tradi- tionally, this is a difficult problem since the analytical ex- pression for the probability density function of a general SαS distribution remains unknown. In order to tackle this diffi- culty, we adopt Fourier power transform to obtain an exact bit error rate (BER) expression for the Genie-aided receiver as well as a BER upper bound for the conventional linear matched filter receiver, without taking any approximation. Monte-Carlo simulations are performed to validate our ana- lytical results. The simulation results show that our proposed BER expressions are valid in the whole geometric signal- noise-ratio (GSNR) ranges, thus outperforming the previous results valid only at high GSNR values.