Adaptive-Threshold Blanking for Impulsive Noise Reduction in OFDM-based Power Line Communications

K.S. Al-Mawali and Z.M. Hussain (Australia)

Keywords

Power line Communications, Impulsive noise, OFDM, Blanking.

Abstract

Unlike many other communication channels, noise in the power line channel can not be described by Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN). This is due to the occurrence of impulsive noise and other narrow-band interferences. Impulsive noise, in particular, can degrade the performance of OFDM-based Power Line Communication (PLC) systems significantly. Blanking nonlinearity is a popular technique for impulsive noise reduction, due to its simplicity. In this paper, we propose an adaptive-threshold blanking technique that is based on the minimum Bit Error Rate (BER) for impulsive noise reduction in OFDM-based PLC receivers. For our simulations, we adopt a widely accepted and practically proven channel model for broadband power line communication. Three noise environments, namely ”heavily disturbed”, ”medium disturbed” and ”weakly disturbed”, that are based on practical measurements are used to investigate the performance of blanking nonlinearity be fore and after employing the proposed adaptive threshold by means of computer simulations.

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