Analysis of performance of BPSK in an additive combination of impulsive and Gaussian noise

We analyze the bit error rate (BER) performance of a correlation receiver subject to impulsive plus Gaussian noise with coherent binary phase-shift keying (BPSK). The impulsive component of the noise is assumed to be due to random occurrences of impulses following a Poisson arrival process. Using the moments of the impulsive component, a series expression for the BER is derived by a Taylor's series approach. From this expression, approximate formulae for extreme values of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and impulse arrival rate (IAR) are obtained. Numerical results show that when the square root raised cosine pulse is used, (1) the BER performance improves with increase of the rolloff factor, but the improvement becomes more significant with decrease of the Gaussian-to-total noise ratio or increase of the IAR, (2) as the rolloff factor increases, a decrease of the IAR degrades the BER performance for low SNRs, but improves it for high SNRs.