CANONICAL DETECTION IN SPHERICALLY INVARIANT NOISE

The paper deals with the detection of signals with unknown parameters in impulsive noise, modeled as a spherically symmetric random process. The proposed model subsumes several interesting families of noise amp litude distributions: generalized Cauchy, generalized Laplace, general ized Gaussian, contaminated normal. It also allows handling of the cas e of correlated noise by a whitening approach. The generalized maximum likelihood decision strategy Is adopted, resulting in a canonical det ector, which is independent of the amplitude distribution of the noise . A general method for performance evaluation is outlined, and a compr ehensive performance analysis is carried out for the case of M-ary equ al-energy orthogonal signals under several distributional assumptions for the noise. The performance is contrasted with that of the maximum likelihood receiver for completely known signals, so as to assess the loss due to the a-priori uncertainty as to the signal parameters.