Dynamic Peak-Based Threshold Estimation Method for Mitigating Impulsive Noise in Power-Line Communication Systems

Abstract

Impulsive noise (IN) is one of the most dominant factors responsible for degrading the performance of power-line communication systems. One of the common techniques for mitigating IN is blanking which is applied at the front end of the receiver to zero the incoming signal when it exceeds a certain threshold. Determining the optimal blanking threshold (OBT) is, however, key for achieving the best performance. Most reported work to find the OBT is based on the availability of the long-term characteristics of IN at the receiver. In this paper, we consider orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based power-line communications and propose a method for finding the OBT without requiring any knowledge about the IN. We show that there is a direct relationship between the OBT and the peak-to-average power value of the OFDM symbol and utilize it to identify the OBT. The results reveal that the proposed technique not only eliminates the need to prior knowledge about the characteristics of IN but also achieves a gain between 0.5-2.5 dB depending on the accuracy of the signal peak-to-average estimate. It will also be shown how the performance of the proposed method can be further enhanced by employing some basic signal per processing at the transmitter.Index Terms-Blanking, impulsive noise, Middleton class-A noise, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), peak-to-average power (PAPR), power-line communications (PLC), signal-to-impulsive-noise ratio (SINR), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).

Efficient Impulsive Noise Mitigation for OFDM Systems Using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers

“…The frequency range is 35∼91 kHz, which is adopted by the NBPLC standard [19,26]. Using the model, we can obtain the subcarrier gain, which are used as the diagonal elements of matrix in (11). At the receiver the zero-forcing equalizer is adopted to equalize the received symbols.…”

“…In this work, we focus on the mitigation of asynchronous impulsive noise, for which the common methods include clipping or blanking [8][9][10][11]. In [8,9], the optimal clipping and blanking thresholds are derived in closed-form under the conditions that the occurrence probability of impulsive noise and the noise power can be perfectly estimated at the receiver.…”

“…In [10], the method of moments (MoM) is used to estimate the parameters and update adaptively the thresholds on assuming that the statistics of impulsive noise maintains stationary in a long period. In [11], a framework of optimal blanking threshold (OBT) estimation is proposed based on the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of signals. However it is difficult to obtain the PAPR values at the receiver.…”

Performance of DCSK system with blanking circuit for power-line communications

“…The blanking method that is introduced in this study can nullify the effects of impulsive noise [6] to a large extent. Various chaos-based communication systems with both coherent and non-coherent detection have been proposed in the last decade [7]- [10].…”

Improved DPTE technique for impulsive noise mitigation over power-line communication channels

“…Determining the optimal blanking threshold (OBT) remains the key for improving these probabilities. Two different techniques have been introduced in the literature to determine the OBT, namely, the unmodified [19,20] and the dynamic peakbased threshold estimation (DPTE) [21]. The former technique relies on the assumption that in order to find the OBT, the noise characteristics must be accurately known apriori in the form of signal-to-impulsive noise ratio (SINR) and the IN probability of occurrence.…”