Robust receiver algorithms to mitigate partial-band and partial-time interference in ldpc-coded OFDM systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems are vulnerable to narrow-band jamming signals. We jointly tackle two problems: channel estimation in the presence of unknown interference, and decoding with imperfect channel knowledge. In this paper, we propose robust, yet simple, receiver algorithms consisting of both channel estimation and information decoding. The receiver conducts threshold tests to detect interference followed by pilot erasure and channel estimation. Then, channel estimation error and unknown interference statistics are dealt with by the robust log-likelihood ratio (LLR) calculations for soft iterative decoding. The proposed receiver algorithm does not require any statistical knowledge of interference and its complexity is linear against the length of codewords. Simulation results show that the bit-error-rate (BER) performance of the proposed system is only 2~3 dB away from a genie system where channel information and interference parameters are perfectly known. We also demonstrate that soft decision feedback from a decoder to enhance channel estimation achieves additional 0.5 ~ 1dB improvement.