A Generalized Gaussian noise receiver for improved underwater communication in leptokurtic noise

Underwater acoustic (UWA) communication has always been a challenging area of research where noise arising from impulsive sources is one of the major issues in establishing a reliable communication link. Most communication and signal processing techniques rely on the fact that channel noise is Gaussian distributed. But the impulsive noise samples make the overall noise PDF leptokurtic and restrict the traditional AWGN receivers from providing optimal performance. This gives us a motivation to design new receivers for achieving improved performance of UWA links in the presence of leptokurtic noise. In literature, leptokurtic noise has been well-described by the Generalized Gaussian (GG) statistics. In this paper also the same has been considered and an optimal receiver has been designed accordingly. Performance of the proposed receiver has been evaluated in the presence of simulated as well as sea-recorded leptokurtic noise. Results show that using the optimal GG noise receiver improves system performance in comparison to traditional AWGN receivers not only in ideal distortion-less channels but also in multipath UWA channels.