What does AWGN mean in Networking?

Additive white Gaussian noise

Additive white Gaussian noise 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 power across the frequency band for the information system. It is an analogy to the color white which has 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. Wideband noise comes from many natural sources, such as the thermal vibrations of atoms in conductors, 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 channel model in which the only impairment to communication is a linear addition of wideband or white noise with a constant spectral density and a Gaussian distribution of amplitude.

see more »