Low-density parity-check coding for impulse noise correction on power-line channels

Abstract

This paper considers the design of near capacity-achieving error correcting codes for a discrete multi-tone system in the presence of both additive white Gaussian noise and impulse noise. Impulse noise is one of the main channel impairments in the power-line channel. One way to combat impulse noise is to detect the presence of the impulses and to declare an erasure when an impulse occurs. In this paper, we propose a coding system based on irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and bit-interleaved coded modulation. We show that by carefully choosing the degree distribution of the irregular LDPC code, both the additive noise and the erasures can be handled in a single code. We show that the proposed system can perform close to the capacity of the channel and for the same redundancy is significantly more immune to the impulse noise than the existing methods based on an outer Reed-Solomon code.