Impulse Noise Correction in OFDM Systems

In orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, the impulse noise causes catastrophic accuracy degradation since the impulse noise affects all the subcarriers in a symbol due to the fast Fourier transform (FFT) operations at the receiver. Potential causes of impulse noise include erasure channel, power switching, and circuit failure in integrated circuits. In this paper, from a practical observation, a novel iterative impulse error correction scheme is proposed. This scheme is referred to as the impulse noise location and value search algorithm, which is based on the crucial observation of the relationship of the impulse noise and the symbol constellation. In a 512-FFT OFDM system at 25 dB additive white Gaussian noise signal-to-noise ratio, for quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM)-4 and QAM-8 modulation, simulation results show that our proposed novel scheme can effectively correct impulse errors that corrupt up to 20.7 % and 13.9 % of the received time-domain signal at known locations. In addition, without the knowledge of impulse noise location, the proposed scheme still can correct at least 9.96 % of the received time-domain signal for QAM-4 modulation.