Impulsive Modelling of Noise for OFDM Systems in Power Line Communication: A Necessity or a Redundant Task?

In Power Line Communication, variations in the characteristics of power lines and additive noise reduce the efficiency of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), and that makes channel estimation essential. The earlier estimation techniques in the literature assume channel noise is Gaussian as in the wireless communication, whereas the recent ones model the corrupted noise more realistic, impulsive, which results in complicated receivers. This study judges the need of impulsive noise modelling and complex receivers. The performances of two Maximum A-Posteriori (MAP) channel estimators proposed for additive Gaussian noise and impulsive noise are compared under impulsive noise. The channel data used in the simulations is taken from the literature and impulsive noise is modelled by Middleton Class A distribution. The results show that the MAP estimator, which assumes Gaussian noise instead of impulsive, has better performance. The MAP estimator which assumes impulsive noise has a satisfactory performance under weak impulsive noise and low Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) only, otherwise its performance is low, close to Maximum Likelihood estimator performance. The estimator designed for Gaussian noise has a better performance even under heavy impulsive noise and this distinction is clearer for low SNR cases.