Mitigation Techniques for Impulsive Noise With Memory Modeled by a Two State Markov-Gaussian Process

Impulsive noise, a common impediment preventing the system from achieving error-free transmission, is significant in many wireless and power line communication environments. Although the performance of several mitigation techniques for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based multicarrier communication systems impaired by memoryless impulsive noise are widely acknowledged, we note that OFDM is outperformed by its single-carrier counterpart when the impulses are very strong and/or they occur frequently, which is likely to exist in contemporary communication systems including smart grid communications. On the other hand, many communication technologies used in the smart grid do not employ OFDM and likewise, the assumption of memoryless noise is not valid for such communication scenarios. Memoryless noise models cannot take into account one of the main features of the actual noise, i.e., the time-correlation among the noise samples. The aim of this article is to compare and analyze several mitigation techniques such as clipping, blanking, and combined clipping-blanking to mitigate the noxious effects of bursty impulsive noise for low-density parity-check coded single-carrier communication systems. Moreover, we propose a log-likelihood ratio (LLR)-based impulsive noise mitigation for the considered scenario. In this context, provided simulation results highlight the superiority of the LLR-based mitigation scheme over the clipping/blanking schemes.