BICM Decoding of Jammed OFDM Transmissions Using the EM Algorithm

Wireless communications over unlicensed frequency bands are expected to suffer from significant co-channel interference, which inevitably limits the error-rate performance. In this letter, an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing system employing bit-interleaved coded-modulation is considered and the problem of reliable decoding in the presence of unknown narrowband interference (NBI) is addressed. The proposed solution operates in an iterative fashion according to the expectation-maximization algorithm and is derived by modeling the interference power on each subcarrier as a random variable with an inverse gamma distribution. Computer simulations indicate that the resulting scheme is effective against NBI and, compared to existing alternatives, it achieves a better trade-off in terms of error rate performance, computational complexity and system overhead.