Signal-quality-aware impulsive noise mitigation for OFDM-based power-line communications

Conventional threshold-based method, such as nulling or clipping, is simple and effective for mitigation of impulsive noise (IN) in power-line commnucations (PLC) environment. However, we raise two issues for the threshold-based approach. First, for orthogonal frequency division modulation (OFDM) broadband PLC systems, the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) characteristics of the received OFDM signals increase the difficulty of determining the threshold in a systematic fashion; second, in the cases of absence of IN or low insertion loss, the threshold-based IN mitigation approach may fail. This paper proposes a signal-quality-aware IN mitigation method to address these two issues. By calculating the kurtosis of the received signals, we can determine whether to null the received signals or not. If the values of kurtosis are high enough, a multi-threshold-based nulling approach is applied, which significantly reduces the false alarm probability of IN detection and hence improves the resulting bit error rate (BER) performance. Based on the specification of IEEE P1901, we setup a simulation to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.