Impulsive Interference Cancellation in Uplink Macro-Diversity Combining

Decision feedback equalizers (DFEs) are designed to deal with AWGN noise, and hence, generally perform very poorly in the presence of impulsive noise. Extreme value theory (EVT) is used to modify the DFE structure to handle impulsive noise. The received measurements are modified using EVT based weights before passing it to the equalizer. A modified maximal ratio combining (MRC) scheme which also uses EVT is developed to further improve the error-rate performance in the presence of impulsive interference. The proposed method performs much better than the conventional DFE-MRC technique which uses the simple MRC in conjunction with the DFE at low signal-to-interference (SIR) ratios.