Impulsive noise mitigation for OFDM-based systems using enhanced blanking nonlinearity

Non-Gaussian impulsive interference mitigation is of great interest in robust and reliable communication over wired and wireless channels. One of the most popular impulsive noise cancellation methods used along with the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is blanking nonlinearity. Although its simplicity and efficiency, the blanking method suffers from inter-carrier interference (ICI) problem due to its nonlinear characteristic. In this paper, an enhanced version of the blanking technique is proposed to cope with the detrimental effects of nonlinear characteristic of blanking method. To do so, an iterative successive interference cancellation technique is proposed to reconstruct ICI and subtract it from received signal in frequency domain. Simulation results show that the proposed enhancement in blanking method significantly decreases the level of the error floors. For instance, a BER of 1.1 × 10^-7 is achievable for highly impulsive environments while conventional OFDM systems experience an error floor at 1.8 × 10^-2.