Sinusoidal impulse attenuation in a PLC multicarrier receiver

The transmission of high bit rates over power lines can be severely limited by large recurrent spurious sinusoidal impulses, even if a robust multi carrier scheme is employed. To cope with this impairment, it is proposed to attenuate the impulse in the received sequence through signal processing techniques. The occurrence of the sinusoidal impulse is, first, detected and its samples are identified. Then, the corrupting samples are reconstructed from parameter estimations and they are subtracted from the received sequence. The simulation results, obtained with a multi carrier scheme based on filter banks and operating in the CENELEC band A, are presented and discussed. They show that a scheme with moderate complexity can attenuate the disturbing impulse sufficiently to restore most of the capacity of the transmission system.