Editing Additive white Gaussian noise (section)

{{Short description|Basic noise model used in information theory}}
{{One source|date=February 2020}}
'''Additive white Gaussian noise''' ('''AWGN''') is a basic noise model used in [[information theory]] to mimic the effect of many random processes that occur in nature. The modifiers denote specific characteristics:
* '''''Additive''''' because it is added to any noise that might be intrinsic to the information system. 
* '''''White''''' refers to the idea that it has uniform [[Spectral density#Power spectral density|power spectral density]] across the frequency band for the information system. It is an analogy to the [[White#White light|color white]] which may be realized by uniform emissions at all frequencies in the [[visible spectrum]]. 
* '''''Gaussian''''' because it has a [[normal distribution]] in the time domain with an average time domain value of zero ([[Gaussian process]]).

Wideband noise comes from many natural noise sources, such as the thermal vibrations of atoms in conductors (referred to as thermal noise or [[Johnson–Nyquist noise]]), [[shot noise]], [[black-body radiation]] from the earth and other warm objects, and from celestial sources such as the Sun. The [[central limit theorem]] of [[probability theory]] indicates that the summation of many random processes will tend to have distribution called Gaussian or Normal.

AWGN is often used as a [[communication channel|channel model]] in which the only impairment to communication is a linear addition of [[wideband]] or [[white noise]] with a constant [[spectral density]] (expressed as [[watt]]s per [[hertz]] of [[Bandwidth (signal processing)|bandwidth]]) and a [[Gaussian distribution]] of amplitude. The model does not account for [[fading]], [[frequency]] selectivity, [[Interference (communication)|interference]], [[nonlinearity]] or [[Dispersion (optics)|dispersion]]. However, it produces simple and tractable mathematical models which are useful for gaining insight into the underlying behavior of a system before these other phenomena are considered.

The AWGN channel is a good model for many [[satellite]] and deep space communication links. It is not a good model for most terrestrial links because of multipath, terrain blocking, interference, etc. However, for terrestrial path modeling, AWGN is commonly used to simulate background noise of the channel under study, in addition to multipath, terrain blocking, interference, ground clutter and self interference that modern radio systems encounter in terrestrial operation.