Investigation into Impulsive Noise Techniques for a G.FAST System

This paper focuses on impulsive noise (IN) mitigation techniques for the fourth generation broadband (4GBB) access network technology, known as G.fast. G.fast has demonstrated data rates up to 1 Gbps over lengths of copper loop up to 250 meters. The copper wire channel is subject to IN and our aim is to study its effect on the G.fast broadband system by modeling a copper wire channel combined with Middleton Class A IN is usually mitigated using simple non-linear techniques such as clipping and blanking, but these become less effective when working with high order QAM constellation, such as those used in G.fast. Therefore, we propose the use of the iterative Zhidkov algorithm to mitigate impulsive noise, for several noise index values. Simulation results show that Zhidkov’s algorithm outperforms the blanking and clipping methods, achieving a significant performance gain, and demonstrating that it is very suitable for use in a G.fast system.