Effects of impulse noise on the performance of multidimensional parity check codes

This paper investigates the effects of impulse noise on the performance of multidimensional parity check codes (MDPC) in additive white Gaussian noise and Rayleigh fading channels. The Bhattacharya upper bound is derived for impulsive noise and is found to closely match with the simulation results. It is observed that impulse noise can degrade the bit error rate performance by several dBs. Further, the use of incorrect impulse noise model in the receiver decoding algorithm is found to cause severe penalty in fading channels. Our results also show that MDPC codes outperform traditional convolutional codes in impulsive noise channels. The performance of MDPC codes is found to be slightly inferior to turbo codes, when the latter uses slightly lower code rate and higher complexity. The capacity limits for impulsive noise channels are also calculated