Noise bucket effect for impulse noise in OFDM

Impulse noise is a significant problem in some orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) applications. It has been observed in practice that the degradation caused by impulse noise depends only on the total energy of the noise during each OFDM symbol, not on the structure of the noise. This ´noise bucket´ effect is explained by showing that even for a small number of impulses per symbol the noise distribution at the input of the receiver decision device is close to Gaussian. This is because of the spreading effect of the discrete Fourier transform.