Successive impulsive noise suppression in OFDM

We consider orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for high data rate narrowband power line communication (PLC) in the frequency bands up to 500 kHz. In narrowband PLC, the performance is strongly influenced by the impulsive noise with very large amplitudes with short durations. Simple iterative impulsive noise suppression algorithms can effectively improve the error rate performance in OFDM systems. However, the convergence speed depends on the number of subcarriers, N. For N ≤ 256, the algorithms converge slowly or not even at all. In this paper, we extend the iterative receiver design to enable a fast convergence for N > 64 and to improve the error rate performance for N ≤ 64. These extensions include 1) a clipping and nulling technique at the input of the iterative algorithm 2) a novel low complexity syndrome decoder which uses the redundancy that is transmitted for synchronization or other purposes. Simulation results are provided to show the improvement in error rate.