MIMO Receiver Design in Impulsive Noise

Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) receivers have been typically designed and their communication performance studied in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise. While this is an accurate model for the thermal noise present at the receiver, it falls short of modeling the radio frequency interference (RFI) that may affect the transceivers. RFI is a combination of independent radiation events and has predominantly non-Gaussian impulsive statistics. In this paper, MIMO receiver design in the presence of impulsive noise has been considered. Performance degradation of conventional MIMO receivers in impulsive noise is demonstrated to motivate this problem. Different impulsive noise models are discussed and a maximum likelihood (ML) receiver is derived for the two receive antenna case which assumes the knowledge of noise statistics at the receiver. Furthermore, a sub-optimal ML receiver is derived with reduced complexity and estimated noise statistics. Simulations reveal significant communication performance improvement over conventional receivers. COPYRIGHT c © 2007. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 2