Impulsive noise suppression in per-survivor processing based DSSS systems

Impulsive noise exists in many underwater acoustic communication environments, while traditional receivers often model it as an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). In a previous work, we proposed per-survivor processing (PSP) based receivers for direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) systems. In this work, we investigate two algorithms, passband and baseband clipping, for impulsive noise mitigation in PSP based DSSS systems. Simulation results show that both the passband and baseband clipping approaches can get better performance than the conventional receiver without clipping. Based on noise data collected from a sea test, the semi-experimental results show that both approaches can yield more than 1 dB gain if clipping ratios are properly selected, and that the passband clipping approach slightly outperforms the baseband clipping approach.