Mitigation of Coloured Impulsive noise in OFDM receiver

Power line communication (PLC) in factory and process automation requires real time capabilities. Therefore, robustness is a key feature in industrial communication. For such power line communication, a common scheme is Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). The major source of noise are variable speed drives that generate impulsive noise. OFDM spreads impulsive noise on several sub-carriers and weaken its impact on BER. It is known that with decreasing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) the BER of all affected sub-carries is rising. There are several non-linear strategies like clipping, nulling and hybrid clipping-nulling to mitigate this impulsive noise. So far, the level of the received samples is used as filter-criterion for these filters. We propose a novel mitigation scheme for coloured impulsive noise based on finite impulse response (FIR) filters. Simulations with coloured impulsive noise show the decreased BER with this novel approach. Furthermore, we measure impulsive noise from variable speed drives and use actual readings to verify the effectiveness of the proposed mitigation scheme.