Compensation of memoryless nonlinearities for active noise control applications

In various fields of communication, control and signal processing the performances of a variety of systems are negatively affected by nonlinear effects. To cope with this problem, it has been proposed in the literature to use suitable linearization procedures. In particular, for memoryless nonlinearities it has been recently proposed to apply an histogram-based compensation technique. The aim of this paper is to show how this method can be profitably applied also in the area of active noise control. We refer, in particular, to feed-forward delay-compensated schemes including a memoryless nonlinearity in the secondary path. We will discuss the peculiarities of the histogram-based compensation in presence of multitonal and broad-band noises. Since these noises have different characteristics, we will analyze the design parameters that in each case allow the correct application of the histogram-based method. Extensive results of simulations are presented to give insights on the optimal choice of those parameters.