Carrier interferometry/OFDM performance in the presence of multipath and impulse noise

This paper characterizes the combined effect of impulse noise and multipath fading on the performance of Carrier Interferometry/orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CI/OFDM). Specifically, we compare the performance of a CI/OFDM system to an OFDM system in the presence of Bernoulli-Gaussian impulse noise and a slow frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel. While CI/OFDM significantly outperforms OFDM in fading channels, the performance degradation of CI/OFDM in impulse noise is more severe relative to the degradation in OFDM. However, due to frequency diversity benefits, CI/OFDM still outperforms traditional OFDM systems for a given signal-to-impulse noise ratio. Furthermore, we show that for environments with a high impulse noise rate and low signal-to-impulse noise ratio, CI/OFDM employing equal gain combining outperforms CI/OFDM employing minimum mean square error combining.