Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation with Iterative Decoding in Impulsive Noise

Power line communications (PLC) suffers performance degradation due mainly to impulsive noise interference generated by electrical appliances. This paper considers the application of bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) in the Class-A impulsive noise environment to improve the spectral efficiency and error performance of PLC. In particular, the soft-input soft-output demodulator is developed for an additive Class-A noise (AWAN) channel so that iterative demodulation and decoding can be performed at the receiver. The effect of signal mapping on the error performance of BICM-ID systems in impulsive noise is also thoroughly investigated, both with computer simulations and a tight error bound on the asymptotic performance