A Study on Impulse Noise and Its Models

This article gives an overview of impulse noise and its models, and points out some important and interesting facts about the study of impulse noise which are sometimes overlooked or not well understood. We discuss the different impulse noise models in the literature, focusing on their similarities and differences when applied in communications systems. The impulse noise models discussed are memoryless (Middleton Class A, Bernoulli-Gaussian and Symmetric alpha-stable), and with memory (Markov-Middleton and Markov-Gaussian). We then go further to give performance comparisons in terms of bit error rates for some of the variants of impulse noise models. We also compare the bit error rate performance of single-carrier (SC) and multi-carrier (MC) communications systems operating under impulse noise. It can be seen that MC is not always better than SC under impulse noise. Lastly, the known impulse noise mitigation schemes (clipping/nulling using thresholds, iterative based and error control coding methods) are discussed.