Impulsive Noise Error Correction in 16-OFDM for Narrowband Power Line Communication

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) with a small number of subcarriers (<= 64) is shown to be promising in the narrowband power line communication (PLC) when the peak-to-average power ratio is reduced to]on the CENELEC standards. Although many authors studied the performance of the OFDM systems under the impulsive noise, their considerations are mostly restricted to OFDM systems with a large number of subcarriers. In that case, discrete Fourier transform (DFT) spreads the impulsive noise in such a way that its distribution in the frequency domain can be approximated as Gaussian. If the number of subcarriers is small, these methods can be hardly used. We describe an iterative algorithm for correcting the impulsive noise errors for the OFDM transmission with a small number of subcarriers. Simulation results for a 16-OFDM-QPSK system show that the influence of impulsive noise can be essentially reduced.