Design of a Test for Detecting the Presence of Impulsive Noise

This paper proposes a new test method of detecting the presence of impulsive noise based on a complementary cumulative density function (CCDF). Impulsive noise severely degrades performance of communication systems and the conventional Kolmogorov–Smirnov (K–S) test may not perform well, because the test does not consider the characteristics of impulsive noise. In order to detect the presence of impulsive noise reliably, the CCDF of measurement samples is analyzed and compared with the CCDF of additive white Gaussian noise to find the difference between those CCDFs. Due to the nature of heavy-tails in impulsive noise, only the maximum difference may not be sufficient for the accurate detection of impulsive noise. Therefore, the proposed method applies the test hypothesis using the weighted sum of all the differences between those CCDFs. Simulation results justify that the proposed test is more robust and provides lower miss detection probability than the K–S test in the presence of impulsive noise.