On impulse noise and its models

This article gives a discussion on impulse noise, its models and how it affects communications systems. We discuss the different impulse noise models in the literature, looking at their similarities and differences in communications systems. The impulse noise models discussed are memoryless (Middleton Class A and Bernoulli-Gaussian), and with memory (Markov- Middleton and Markov-Gaussian). We then go further to give performance comparisons in terms of bit error rates for some of the variants of impulse noise models. We also compare the bit error rate performance of single-carrier (SC) and multi-carrier (MC) communications systems operating under impulse noise. It can be seen that MC is not always better than SC under impulse noise. Lastly, the known impulse noise mitigation schemes (clipping/nulling using thresholds, iterative based and error control coding methods) are discussed.