PhD ThesisCommunication channels can severely degrade a signal, not only due to
fading effects but also interference in the form of impulsive noise. In
conventional communication systems, the additive noise at the receiver
is usually assumed to be Gaussian distributed. However, this assumption
is not always valid and examples of non-Gaussian distributed noise
include power line channels, underwater acoustic channels and manmade
interference. When designing a communication system it is useful
to know the theoretical performance in terms of bit-error probability
(BEP) on these types of channels. However, the effect of impulses on
the BEP performance has not been well studied, particularly when error correcting
codes are employed. Today, advanced error-correcting codes
with very long block lengths and iterative decoding algorithms, such as
Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes and turbo codes, are popular
due to their capacity-approaching performance. However, very long
codes are not always desirable, particularly in communications systems
where latency is a serious issue, such as in voice and video communication
between multiple users. This thesis focuses on the analysis of short
LDPC codes. Finite length analyses of LDPC codes have already been
presented for the additive white Gaussian noise channel in the literature,
but the analysis of short LDPC codes for channels that exhibit impulsive
noise has not been investigated.
The novel contributions in this thesis are presented in three sections.
First, uncoded and LDPC-coded BEP performance on channels exhibiting
impulsive noise modelled by symmetric -stable (S S) distributions
are examined. Different sub-optimal receivers are compared and a new
low-complexity receiver is proposed that achieves near-optimal performance.
Density evolution is then used to derive the threshold signal-tonoise
ratio (SNR) of LDPC codes that employ these receivers. In order
to accurately predict the waterfall performance of short LDPC codes, a
nite length analysis is proposed with the aid of the threshold SNRs of
LDPC codes and the derived uncoded BEPs for impulsive noise channels.
Second, to investigate the e ect of impulsive noise on wireless channels,
the analytic BEP on generalized fading channels with S S noise is derived.
However, it requires the evaluation of a double integral to obtain
the analytic BEP, so to reduce the computational cost, the Cauchy-
Gaussian mixture model and the asymptotic property of S S process
are used to derive upper bounds of the exact BEP. Two closed-form expressions
are derived to approximate the exact BEP on a Rayleigh fading
channel with S S noise. Then density evolution of different receivers is
derived for these channels to nd the asymptotic performance of LDPC
codes. Finally, the waterfall performance of LDPC codes is again estimated
for generalized fading channels with S S noise by utilizing the
derived uncoded BEP and threshold SNRs.
Finally, the addition of spatial diversity at the receiver is investigated.
Spatial diversity is an effective method to mitigate the effects of fading
and when used in conjunction with LDPC codes and can achieve
excellent error-correcting performance. Hence, the performance of conventional
linear diversity combining techniques are derived. Then the
SNRs of these linear combiners are compared and the relationship of
the noise power between different linear combiners is obtained. Nonlinear
detectors have been shown to achieve better performance than
linear combiners hence, optimal and sub-optimal detectors are also presented
and compared. A non-linear detector based on the bi-parameter
Cauchy-Gaussian mixture model is used and shows near-optimal performance
with a significant reduction in complexity when compared with
the optimal detector. Furthermore, we show how to apply density evolution
of LDPC codes for different combining techniques on these channels
and an estimation of the waterfall performance of LDPC codes is derived
that reduces the gap between simulated and asymptotic performance.
In conclusion, the work presented in this thesis provides a framework
to evaluate the performance of communication systems in the presence
of additive impulsive noise, with and without spatial diversity at the
receiver. For the first time, bounds on the BEP performance of LDPC
codes on channels with impulsive noise have been derived for optimal
and sub-optimal receivers, allowing other researchers to predict the performance
of LDPC codes in these type of environments without needing
to run lengthy computer simulations