Cancelling Wideband Impulsive Noise by Processing the Masked Tones in Power Line Communications

It has been demonstrated that Power Line Communications (PLC) can interfere with some radio services. In order to avoid it, PLC standards specify not to transmit at the same frequencies where these radio services operate. These frequencies are called the masked tones. As they carry no transmitted power, the masked tones can be used to detect and cancel impulsive noise (IN), which most of times is wideband and leaks out into the whole PLC band. This research work presents a new procedure to identify and eliminate IN from PLC receivers, being able to recover the original signal samples which have been impaired by the IN pulses.