Robust communication in bursty impulsive noise and Rayleigh block fading

Acoustic systems operating in warm shallow waters need to be robust against impulsive noise. The latter arises from the collective snaps of snapping shrimp populaces that naturally inhabit such waters. Besides being impulsive, the noise realizations also exhibit dependency between closely spaced samples. The implicit memory of such processes cause impulses to cluster together, which makes the process bursty. In our work, we consider the stationary α-sub-Gaussian noise with memory order m (αSGN(m)) model, which characterizes both the impulsiveness and burstiness of a noise process. The model is derived from the family of heavy-tailed symmetric α-stable (SαS) distributions. We investigate the error performance of various detectors for a passband single-carrier communication scheme in αSGN(m) with Rayleigh block fading. The maximum-likelihood (ML) detector is derived and modified robust detectors are proposed by extending the framework of generalized ML estimation theory to the αSGN(m) model. Detailed simulation results are presented to quantify the error performance of the detectors and carrier placement in αSGN(m).