Impulsive Noise Mitigation in Powerline Communications Using Sparse Bayesian Learning
This addresses performance degradation in powerline communication systems due to impulsive noise, offering a novel method that is incremental in improving existing receiver designs.
The paper tackled the problem of impulsive noise degrading OFDM powerline communication performance by modeling the noise as a sparse vector and applying sparse Bayesian learning for estimation and mitigation without training, achieving SNR gains of up to 9 dB in coded and 10 dB in uncoded systems.
Additive asynchronous and cyclostationary impulsive noise limits communication performance in OFDM powerline communication (PLC) systems. Conventional OFDM receivers assume additive white Gaussian noise and hence experience degradation in communication performance in impulsive noise. Alternate designs assume a parametric statistical model of impulsive noise and use the model parameters in mitigating impulsive noise. These receivers require overhead in training and parameter estimation, and degrade due to model and parameter mismatch, especially in highly dynamic environments. In this paper, we model impulsive noise as a sparse vector in the time domain without any other assumptions, and apply sparse Bayesian learning methods for estimation and mitigation without training. We propose three iterative algorithms with different complexity vs. performance trade-offs: (1) we utilize the noise projection onto null and pilot tones to estimate and subtract the noise impulses; (2) we add the information in the data tones to perform joint noise estimation and OFDM detection; (3) we embed our algorithm into a decision feedback structure to further enhance the performance of coded systems. When compared to conventional OFDM PLC receivers, the proposed receivers achieve SNR gains of up to 9 dB in coded and 10 dB in uncoded systems in the presence of impulsive noise.