Coherent communications in snapping-shrimp dominated ambient noise environments

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The additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) model is commonly used in the development of communication systems, and adequately models many noisy environments. However the impulsive noise from snapping shrimp is poorly approximated by this model. The mismatch in model has an adverse impact on the performance of conventional communication systems operating in warm shallow waters. The AWGN model may be replaced by the more general additive white symmetric α-stable noise (AWSαSN) model, which better approximates the heavy tailed noise due to snapping shrimp. When converted to the complex baseband representation, the resulting noise for the AWSαSN case is radically different from its Gaussian counterpart. In this talk some properties of baseband noise for the general AWSαSN case are investigated. These properties can be used to guide design decisions for coherent communication systems operating in warm shallow waters. The baseband noise is generally not isotropic and furthermore the real and imaginary components may be dependent. By varying certain physical parameters different non-isotropic distributions may be attained. The resulting properties can be exploited to design communication systems that are able to provide robust performance in the presence of snapping shrimp noise.