Cluster Impulsive Noise Suppression Approach for Broadband Power-Line Communication Systems

Signal transmission on power-line is always affected by impulsive noise. The most common way of suppressing impulsive noise is to adopt nonlinear preprocessing for noisy signals before OFDM demodulation at the receiver, and one of the most simple and effective method is blanking suppression technology. Impulsive noise according to different types can be divided into Bernoulli Gaussian model and cluster model. Blanking suppression method is remarkable for Bernoulli Gaussian impulsive noise, but for cluster impulsive noise, simple blanking suppression is equivalent to rectangular window handle, can bring obvious spectrum leakage problem. Therefore, this paper proposes a suppression method only for cluster impulsive noise of broadband power-line communication systems. OFDM signal at receiver firstly process discrete Fourier transform, extract guard band signal from the output, combine with time and frequency domain method to estimate the relevant parameters of the impulsive noise, and then build a proper envelope window function on the basis of previous blanking suppression method to inhibit cluster impulsive noise in time domain according to the estimated parameters. This method can not only suppress impulsive noise effectively, but also greatly avoid the spectrum leakage, further improve the performance of the broadband power-line communication systems.