Analysis and Comparison of Several Mitigation Techniques for Middleton Class-A Noise

Impulsive noise is a common impediment in many wireless, power line communication (PLC), and smart grid communication systems that prevents the system from achieving error-free transmission. In this paper, we compare and analyze several impulsive noise mitigation techniques for Middleton class-A noise considering single carrier modulation with low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded transmission. For this, we investigate the widely used non-linear methods such as clipping, blanking, and combined clipping/blanking to mitigate the noxious effects of impulsive noise. Although, the performance of these techniques are widely acknowledged for simple Bernoulli-Gaussian impulsive noise mitigation in case of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based multi-carrier communication systems, their mitigation capabilities in regards to Middleton class-A noise remains unknown. We further investigate the log-likelihood ratio (LLR)-based impulsive noise mitigation. Simulation results are provided to highlight the robustness of the LLR-based mitigation scheme over simple clipping/blanking schemes for the considered scenario. Moreover, our results show that while clipping performs better than blanking for Bernoulli-Gaussian noise, the later shows better performance in case of Middleton class-A noise.