The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for disruption of signal reception, and processing, in sensors (receivers) attempting detection, and interpretation, of transmitted signals-of-interest.  The present invention impedes operation of (radar, sonar, and communications) receivers by inserting into the operating environment a heavy-tailed (HT) noise sequence as a jamming signal.  The present invention exploits weaknesses inherent in receivers that are designed to operate in environments where the noise is modeled as additive Gaussian white noise (AGWN).  The present invention describes a noise generation process, and resulting sequences, for random variables (r.v.)  drawn from Pareto, Levy, Weibull, and other heavy-tail probability distribution functions (PDFs) of random variables, which have the effect of exploiting such receivers' non-optimal capabilities in non-Gaussian environments.  In probability theory, heavy-tailed distributions are probability distributions whose tails are not exponentially bounded: that is, they have heavier tails than the exponential distribution.  In many applications it is the right tail of the distribution that is of interest, but a distribution may have a heavy left tail, or both tails may be heavy.  There are two important subclasses of heavy-tailed distributions, the long-tailed distributions and the subexponential distributions.  In practice, all commonly used heavy-tailed distributions belong to the subexponential class.  The present invention was motivated by the need to disrupt improvised explosive devices (IED): many of which have been designed to be triggered remotely through a radio frequency (RF) signal directed at receiver components embedded in, or part of, commercially manufactured cell phones, or remote-control devices (whose original function was intended for hobbyist cars/aircraft or for garage doors). 
Under various assumptions, preliminary simulations indicate that jamming waveforms derived from heavy-tailed distributions outperform traditional AWGN jamming by as much as 10 dB versus when conventional Gaussian type of waveforms are used in jamming GSM cellular communications networks.