Performance and Design of an Impulse Noise Detector for OFDM Systems with Reed-Solomon Erasure-Decoding

We develop an analytical framework to evaluate the probability-of-miss and probability-of-false-alarm performance of an impulse noise (IN) detection algorithm for orthogonal frequency-domain multiplexing (OFDM) symbols based on monitoring the post-frequency-domain-equalizer (FEQ) instantaneous error at the output of the QAM constellation demapper over a range of tones (sub-carriers). Using the VDSL system as a reference, we further analyze the impact of impulse-noise detection error events at the scale of the OFDM symbol (miss and false alarm) on the bit-error-rate (BER) performance of interleaved Reed-Solomon (RS) codes with erasure-decoding. The analysis culminates with a sequence of steps to design the parameters of the frequency-domain IN detector based on the design BER of the communication system and practical transceiver features such as noise-margin and seamless-rate-adaptation (SRA). We conclude that a tone-error based frequency-domain IN detector monitoring 100 tones is capable of providing IN detection performance that does not cause a deterioration of the average BER below the VDSL system design BER of 10^-7 when interleaved RS coding with erasure-decoding is employed.