Analysis of the Impact of Impulsive Noise Parameters on BER Performance of OFDM Power-Line Communications

It is well known that asynchronous impulsive noise is the main source of distortion that drastically affects the power-line communications (PLC) performance. Recently, more realistic models have been proposed in the literature which better fit the physical properties of real impulsive noise. In this paper, we consider a pulse train model and propose a thorough analysis of the impact of impulsive noise parameters, namely impulse width and amplitude as well as inter-arrival time, on the bit error rate (BER) performance of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) broadband PLC. A comparison with the conventional Bernoulli-Gaussian (BG) impulsive noise model exhibits the difference between the two approaches, showing the necessity of more realistic models.