Mitigation of Effect of Impulsive Noise for OFDM Systems over Power Line Channels

Abstract

Impulsive noise introduces significant time variance into the power line channel and causes performance degradation of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In this paper, we provide a performance analysis for OFDM-based power line communications in the presence of impulsive noise. Performance degradation of coherent M-ary PSK and differential MPSK can be mitigated by a signal level limiter. Simulation results present that the optimum signal level can significantly improve the performance of OFDM systems over power line channels with impulsive noise.