Improving blanking/clipping based impulsive noise mitigation over powerline channels

Powerline communication technology is a promising communication platform for smart grid and has nowadays become an attractive alternative for data transmission in the home. Impulsive noise (IN) over such channels, however, remains the main factor responsible for degrading communication signals. Many techniques for mitigating IN have been reported in the literature the most common of which is preceding the OFDM receiver with blanking, clipping or hybrid (combined blanking-clipping) nonlinear preprocessors. In this paper, we propose to enhance the capability of these techniques by preprocessing the signal at the transmitter. A closed-form analytical expression for the probability of IN detection error is derived and the problem of blanking/clipping threshold selection is also considered. The results reveal that the proposed is able to minimize the probability of IN detection error significantly and can provide up to 3dB SNR improvement relative to the conventional techniques.