Performance Analysis of ACO/DCO-OFDM Hybrid PLC-VLC Receivers With Blanking Non-Linearity

Blanking non-linearity is broadly used in impulsive noise communication environments due to its efficiency and ease of deployment to mitigate such noise. During the blanking procedure, data samples with impulsive noise are identified and clipped to zero, which removes impulsive noise from the system thereby, improving the system performance. In this regard, this paper investigates the performance of hybrid power line communication-visible light communication (PLC-VLC) systems with blanking nonlinearity. The signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio at the output of the blanking device is deduced using a closed-form analytical expression. The results show that there is good agreement between simulation results and theory if there is a sufficiently large number of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) sub-carriers. In addition, the study also indicates that the blanking method is more effective in curbing impulsive noise in comparison to the clipping technique. According to the threshold optimisation investigations, there exists a worst-case SINR value that minimizes the output SNR at the OFDM receiver after blanking. Furthermore, the findings also revealed that proper blanking threshold selection is essential for obtaining the best performance.