Masreliez-Equalized VOFDM in Non-Gaussian Channels: Power Line Communication Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we derive a nonlinear equalizer for a fading channel with non-Gaussian noise. In particular, we look into the effects of non-Gaussian noise over power line channels that severely affect communication signals. Unlike most existing work based on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) in the literature, we investigate the performance of vector OFDM (VOFDM) over multipath power line communication (PLC) channels contaminated with Middleton Class-A noise. To reduce the impact of impulsive noise, we propose a novel filter to equalize the output of the channel. The performance of the equalizer is evaluated in terms of bit error rate (BER), and the impact of several impulsive noise parameters are examined at the receiver. Results show that the proposed system can considerably improve the BER performance in comparison to the conventional OFDM scheme. In addition, it is shown that increasing the number of vector blocks of the VOFDM system will enhance the BER performance under the same condition. The proposed nonlinear equalizer improves the performance of VOFDM system successfully at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), at some instances it nearly halved the probability of error with respect to linear filter.