Effective noise cancellation using single-carrier FDMA transmission in power-line channels

In power-line channels, impulsive noise (IN) is commonly reduced using a blanking technique in which the received signal is zeroed whenever it exceeds a certain threshold value. Determining an appropriate threshold, however, is critical to the performance of this technique as erroneously blanking unaffected parts of the signal will significantly degrade system performance. In this paper, we show that the performance of this technique is sensitive not only to the blanking threshold but also to the transmitted signal's peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). With this in mind, we propose to implement single-carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA), which inherently has low PAPR, and address the issue of optimizing the blanking threshold for such a technique. The results reveal that significant improvements can be achieved with respect to the probability of blanking error, as well as achieving up to 4 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement relative to the conventional orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing case. Furthermore, it will be shown that in some cases of SC-FDMA, not only can a significant SNR enhancement be achieved but it is also possible to optimally blank IN irrespective of the noise characteristics.