On Reliable Communications over Channels Impaired by Bursty Impulse Noise

Digital communications over channels impaired by impulse noise are addressed. We adopt a two-state Markov model that allows to describe the typical bursty nature of the impulse noise, in contrast to the memoryless models generally considered in the literature. For this channel, we evaluate the achievable information rate and propose a couple of practical communication systems based on powerful codes and iterative receivers. Moreover, we discuss the effectiveness of the considered receivers in terms of performance/latency tradeoff as well as in terms of robustness to erroneous channel estimations. The proposed schemes are shown to perform fairly close to the theoretical limits, and significantly better than the conventional schemes employing memoryless detection.