Analytical evaluation of BER performance of a power line communication system using symmetrical alpha stable (SαS) impulsive noise model

An Analytical approach is presented to evaluate the effect of impulsive noise on the bit error rate performance of a OFDM power line communication system in the presence of background non-white Gaussian noise. The symmetric alpha-stable (SαS) model of impulsive noise is considered to evaluate the BER. The results are evaluated numerically for several power line noise bandwidth and background Gaussian noise to impulsive noise ratio. The results show that there is significant deterioration of BER performance due to impulsive noise and system suffers penalty in receiver sensitivity which is about 50dB, 45dB, 39dB and 35dB for the ratio of Gaussian noise to impulsive noise variance, Γ= 0.1, 0.05, 0.025 and 0.01 respectively at a skewness and heaviness of the tails of the density function, α = 0.1. The analytical results are found to be in good agreement with simulation results reported earlier.