On iterative impulsive noise mitigation in uncoded OFDM

This paper addresses the additive impulsive noise mitigation for the uncoded OFDM based digital communication. Due to the noise spreading effect of the Fourier transformation, impulsive noise with large amplitude and short duration degrades the performance of OFDM transmission drastically. In this paper, we first review the simple iterative impulsive noise suppression algorithms and clipping and/or nulling techniques and show that the performance of the algorithms depends on the number of subcarriers in OFDM. For large number of subcarriers, the convergence speed is fast, whereas, for small number of subcarriers, the algorithms converge slowly or not even at all. Following up on this observation, we propose an iterative impulsive noise suppression algorithm that corrects the multiple random impulsive errors. The algorithm introduces no redundancy and exploits the properties of Fourier Transform. We illustrate with error rate simulations that large performance gains can be achieved even with the small number of iterations.