MC-CDMA Transmission with Blanking Nonlinearity for Impulsive Noise Power-Line Communication Channels

In this paper we investigate the application of multi-carrier code division multiple access (MC- CDMA) in impulsive noise power-line channels. In order to improve system performance, impulsive noise blanking is utilized at the receiver´s front-end. For comparison-sake, three families of spreading codes are considered here, namely, pseudonoise (PN), Walsh-Hadamard (WH) and poly- phase (PP) sequences. Probability of blanking error P_b and output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performances are adopted to characterize the achievable gains. The results reveal that the proposed scheme is able to achieve considerable improvements in terms of P_b and output SNR performance. It is also shown that PP-based MC- CDMA yields the best overall performance with a 1.2 dB SNR gain relative to blanking-based orthogonal frequency division multiple access systems.