Diversity reception in alpha-stable impulsive interference

We evaluate the performance of asymptotically optimum multichannel structures for incoherent detection of amplitude-fluctuating bandpass signals in impulsive interference modeled as a bivariate, isotropic, symmetric, alpha-stable process. We derive a test statistic that takes into account the infinite variance in the noise model and approaches the performance of the strictly optimum algorithm for fixed (non-zero) error probabilities as the sample size becomes infinite and the input SNR tends to zero. We show that exact knowledge of the noise distribution is not required for almost optimum performance.