Noise enhanced detection in multiple-access environments

Abstract

Under certain conditions, addition of noise can enhance performance of suboptimal detectors, which is called the stochastic resonance (SR) effect. In this paper, the effects of SR are investigated for conventional detectors in the presence of multiple-access interference. First, conditions under which probability of error performance of the detector can or cannot be improved are obtained. Then, performance of noise enhanced detectors are analyzed, and an upper bound on the amount of performance improvement that can be obtained via SR is derived. Numerical examples are presented to support the theoretical analysis.