Joint estimation of state and noise parameters in a linear dynamic system with impulsive measurement noise: Application to OFDM systems

Interference mitigation is one of the main challenges in wireless communication, especially in ad hoc networks. In such context, the Multiple Access Interference (MAI) is known to be of an impulsive nature. Therefore, the conventional Gaussian assumption is inadequate to model this type of interference. Nevertheless, it can be accurately modeled by stable distributions. In fact, it was shown in literature that the alpha-stable distribution is a useful tool to model impulsive data. In this paper, we tackle the problem of noise compensation in ad hoc networks. More precisely, this issue is addressed within an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transmission link assuming a symmetric alpha-stable model for the signal distortion due to MAI. Based on Bayesian estimation, the proposed approach estimates the transmitted OFDM symbols in the time domain using the Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods. Unlike existing schemes, we consider the more realistic case where the impulsive noise parameters are assumed to be unknown at the receiver. Consequently, our approach deals also with the difficult task of noise parameters estimation which can be very useful for other purposes such as target tracking in wireless sensor networks or channel estimation. Simulations results, provided in terms of Mean Square Error (MSE) and Bit Error Rate (BER), illustrate the efficiency and the robustness of this scheme. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.