Performance bounds for optimum and suboptimum reception under Class-A impulsive noise

The transmission over the memoryless additive white Class-A noise (AWCN) channel is considered. For uncoded transmission, an exact expression for the symbol error rate is derived. For coded transmission, the Chernoff bound on the pairwise error probability is calculated and the performance achieved on the real and the complex AWCN channels is compared. Moreover, a low-complexity, suboptimum decoding metric is derived and analyzed employing the cutoff rate as a performance criterion.