Null subcarriers assisted impulsive noise mitigation for in-vehicle power line communication in the presence of narrowband interference

Impulsive noise (IN) is one of the crucial affecting factors of in-vehicle power line communication (PLC) systems, and therefore an effective IN mitigation scheme is required to enhance the performance significantly. Narrowband interference (NBI) from various nearby radios often has great impact on the IN reconstruction and mitigation. In this paper, IN mitigation over uncoded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) PLC systems is investigated considering the impact of NBI. A null subcarriers assisted IN mitigation scheme is proposed to mitigate IN in the scenarios of NBI absence and NBI presence. The IN vector is reconstructed at the proposed receiver first, and then canceled out from the received signal. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the blanking method. Also, the implementation of pre-joint NBI/IN mitigation with the aid of null subcarriers in the proposed scheme can combat the impact of intensive NBI, and achieve a near-optimal bit error rate performance with no iterations. The effectiveness of the proposed mitigation scheme is validated by simulation results, which is applicable to the vehicular environments under the disturbance of joint IN and NBI.