Optimum and suboptimum space-diversity detection of weak signals in non-Gaussian noise

The structure of the locally optimum space-diversity detector for coherent detection of a bandpass signal subject to amplitude fluctuations in the presence of narrow-band non-Gaussian noise is derived and its large-sample performance is evaluated. For easy implementation a suboptimum structure is proposed. It consists of local detectors performing independent local decisions and of a central processor that, working according to simple logical schemes (OR or AND), performs the global decision based on the local ones. Numerical results and a comparison between the performances of both proposed structures are presented and discussed.