Design and Performance Analysis of Nonlinearity Preprocessors in an Impulsive Noise Environment

Abstract

This paper discusses a practical design of nonlinearity preprocessors to be used in a receiver for mitigating performance degradation in an impulsive noise environment. A simple method is proposed for a blanker and a soft limiter to calculate a blanking and a clipping threshold, respectively. In addition, to evaluate the bit error performance of a receiver with the proposed nonlinearity preprocessors, this paper introduces an approach using a periodic pulse train function and Fourier series. When a nonlinearity preprocessor is used, since the output samples show a truncated probability density function, it is generally difficult to evaluate the bit error performance of a receiver. Analytical and simulation results show that the thresholds computed by the proposed method are near optimal in terms of efficacy function and that the error performance of the proposed nonlinearity preprocessors matches well with that of the ideal design of nonlinearity preprocessors with optimal thresholds.