Iterative algorithms for impulsive noise reduction in OFDM-based power line communications

Power line communications (PLC) is a technology that permits data transmission using electrical networks. In the last few years, multimedia transmission (e.g., audio, image and video) over electrical signals has received a huge amount of research interest thanks to the already-existing indoor networks. However, impulsive noise presents the most impairments in PLC systems caused by switching transients in the in-home networking. In this paper, we propose some iterative suppression algorithms based on accurate impulsive noise estimation, using an adaptive threshold under a target false alarm probability. The proposed algorithms detect the amplitudes of impulsive noise, and then cancel them iteratively from the received contaminated signal. The results show that the proposed algorithms provide noticeable improvement in terms of bit error rate, peak signal-to-noise ratio, and visual reconstructed image quality, when compared to that of the conventional methods.