Linear combining of nonlinear preprocessors for OFDM-based power-line communications

Nonlinear preprocessors, including conventional clipping, blanking, joint blanking/clipping, and deep clipping, have been employed to mitigate the impulsive noise in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing-based power-line communications. Those nonlinear preprocessors are characterized by one or two thresholds, which are optimized to achieve an optimum output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this paper, we aim to further improve the output SNR by linearly combining two nonlinear preprocessors. Both analytical and simulation results show that the proposed method yields better output SNR and symbol/bit error rate performance than the individual ones.