An adaptive recursive noise compensator for impulsive noise mitigation over OFDM power line communication

Powerline networks are recently being used for broadband data transmission such as Internet, image and video delivery. Improving the quality of broad transmission over PLC channel is of great importance and an area of current interests. In this paper, we propose a novel estimation and noise mitigation method for power line communication (PLC) systems in impulsive noise environments. For this purpose, an adaptive recursive noise compensator (ARNC) algorithm is proposed, based on an iterative estimation of the impulsive noise, using the signal to impulsive noise power ratio (SINR), and the peak to average power ratio (PAPR) in the time domain after channel equalization and OFDM demodulation. A new clipping/blanking function is introduced to estimate and detect the impulsive bursts. When bit error rate (BER) and mean square error (MSE) are evaluated, the proposed method achieves high performance in an attenuated 15-paths condition. The signal-to-noise (SNR) improvements obtained by the proposed algorithm can achieve 11–18 dB under Eb/No = 0 dB and more than 12 dB at BER = 10−3 for OFDM signal using quadratic phase-shift keying (QPSK) modulation.