Improving PSK performance in snapping shrimp noise with rotated constellations

Abstract

Snapping shrimp are small marine animals that are typically found in coastal regions with coral reefs. These crustaceans live in droves and are the dominant source of high-frequency ambient noise in their habitat. The noise generated by the shrimp is impulsive and is detrimental to the performance of sonar and underwater communication systems. In this pa- per we use heavy-tailed symmetric α -stable (SαS) distributions to model snapping shrimp noise. In conventional dig- ital communication systems, most processing is done at the baseband level. We investigate the characteristics of complex baseband noise derived from passband additive white symmetric α-stable noise (AWSαSN) using linear passband- to-baseband converters. The resulting baseband noise distributions, although symmetric, are generally anisotropic with dependent components. Further still, the geometric structure of the anisotropy may be controlled by varying certain system parameters. We exploit this structure to enhance error performance for the binary and quadrature phase shift keying (BPSK/QPSK) schemes by rotating constellations. Copyright 2012 ACM.