Underwater acoustic communication in the presence of heavy-tailed impulsive noise with bi-parameter cauchy-Gaussian mixture model

Abstract

Underwater acoustic (UWA) noise is dominated by impulsive sources in shallow water areas. This leads to a situation where the noise density function shows a heavier tail than that of the Gaussian density and the performance of traditional Gaussian receiver becomes sub-optimal or even worse. In this paper we investigate the scenario where UWA channel noise is non-Gaussian. Several literatures have shown that heavy-tailed impulsive noise can be very well modelled by the bi-parameter Cauchy-Gaussian mixture (CGM) distribution which is an approximation to the symmetric a-stable class. We derive the analytical expression for probability of error with CGM noise statistics for an M-QAM UWA system, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not yet been reported elsewhere. Also we have simulated a UWA system where the performance of a traditional Gaussian receiver is studied in the presence of CGM noise statistics.