A New Approach to Peak Threshold Estimation for Impulsive Noise Reduction over Power Line Fading Channels

Adebisi, Bamidele ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9071-9120, Anoh, KOO, Rabie, Khaled ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9784-3703, Ikpehai, Augustine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5254-8188, Fernando, M and Wells, Andrew (2018) A New Approach to Peak Threshold Estimation for Impulsive Noise Reduction over Power Line Fading Channels. IEEE Systems Journal, 13 (2). pp. 1682-1693. ISSN 1932-8184

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Abstract

Impulsive noise (IN) is a major component that degrades signal integrity in power line communication (PLC) systems. PLC systems driven by orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) have Rayleigh distributed amplitudes. Based on the dynamic nature of each OFDM symbol, peak amplitude of the symbol was recently shown to be a suitable threshold for detecting IN and this technique outperforms conventional optimal blanking (COB) scheme. In this study, we improve the dynamic peak-based threshold estimation (DPTE) scheme that relies on the OFDM Rayleigh distributed amplitudes by converting the default Rayleigh distribution to uniform distribution to unveil IN with power levels below that of the conventional peak signal. Then, we perform nonlinear mitigation processing on the received signals whose amplitudes exceed the uniformly distributed amplitude using blanking; a scheme we will refer to as uniformly distributed DPTE (U-DPTE). Our results (based on U-DPTE) significantly outperforms DPTE scheme by up to 4dB gain in terms of output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Additionally and unlike earlier DPTE studies, we propose a novel threshold criteria that compensates the Gaussian noise power level amplification (after equalization) for achieving optimal SNR over a log-normal multipath fading channel. The results further reveal the sub-optimality of the DPTE scheme over COB.