Single-carrier FDMA with blanking/clipping for mitigating impulsive noise over PLC channels

Communication signals over power-line channels can be affected greatly by impulsive noise (IN). The effect of this noise is commonly reduced with the application of a nonlinear preprocessor at the receiver such as blanking, clipping or hybrid (combined blanking and clipping) that blanks and/or clips the received signal when it exceeds a certain threshold. Erroneous blanking/clipping of the unaffected signals can lead to significant performance degradations. It is found that determining the optimal blanking/clipping threshold is the key for achieving best performance. In contract to these studies, we show in this paper that the performance of the nonlinear preprocessing-based method is not only impacted by the blanking/clipping threshold but also by the transmitted signal's peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). In light of this and for more efficient IN cancellation we, therefore, propose to implement single-carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA), which inherently has low PAPR properties, combined with a nonlinear preprocessor at the receiver. The results reveal that the proposed system can provide significant enhancements in terms of minimizing the probability of IN detection error as well as achieving up to 4dB gain in the output signal-to-noise ratio relative to the conventional OFDM case.