I. Introduction
Reliable data transmission over wireless link in the presence of different kinds of destructive interference, such as inter-symbol interference (ISI) caused by multi-path propagation and/or various types of background interference and noise, is a challenging task [1]. The background interference and noise are generally modeled as additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), in which case closed-form and optimal receivers exist and are well known [2]. However, in many communication scenarios, e.g., urban and indoor channels [3], underwater acoustic channels [4] and power line communication (PLC) channels [5]–[7], the interference may be generally impulsive in nature and exhibits non-Gaussian statistics. Impulsive noise has a short duration with a random occurrence rate and high power spectral density, hence it can severely affect the system performance. Among many impulsive noise models, the symmetric alpha-stable () distribution has been proved to be a good statistical model [8], [9] and thus will be considered for all the analysis in this paper.