Mitigation of Impulsive Frequency-Selective Interference in OFDM Based Systems

In this paper, an algorithm for mitigating impulsive interference in OFDM based systems is presented. It improves the conventional blanking nonlinearity approach for interference mitigation, which typically distorts the entire received signal, by combining the blanked and the original signal. The algorithm uses a Neyman-Pearson like testing procedure to detect interference at individual sub-carriers. Provided interference is detected, the blanked and the original received signals are then optimally combined such as to maximize the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio. The algorithm does not require any prior knowledge about the impulsive interference and only marginally increases computational complexity as compared to the conventional blanking nonlinearity approach. Numerical results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme.