Constant envelope OFDM transmission over impulsive noise power-line communication channels

Abstract

Signal blanking is a simple and efficient method to reduce the effect of impulsive noise over power-line channels. The efficiency of this method, however, is found to be not only impacted by the threshold selection but also by the average peak-to-average ratio (PAPR) value of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals. As such, the blanking capability can be further enhanced by reducing the PAPR value. With this in mind, in this paper we evaluate the performance of constant envelope OFDM (CE-OFDM) which has inherently the lowest achievable PAPR of 0 dB; therefore, the proposed system is expected to provide the lower bound performance of the blanking-based method. In order to characterize system performance, we consider the probability of blanking error and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the output of the blanking device. The results reveal that the proposed system can achieve significant improvements over the conventional OFDM blanking-based scheme in terms of minimized probability of blanking error. It will also be shown that output SNR gains of up to 6 dB can be attained over the conventional OFDM blanking-based systems.