Analysis and Experimental Validation of Efficient Coded OFDM for an Impulsive Noise Environment

Area of Science:

• Electrical Engineering
• Communications Engineering
• Signal Processing

Background:

• Industry-academia synergy enables experimental validation of research.
• Software-Defined Radio (SDR) platforms facilitate real-world hardware testing of communication systems.
• Impulsive noise in substations poses a significant challenge to reliable communication.

Purpose of the Study:

• To validate an impulsive noise resistant physical layer.
• To investigate the efficacy of concatenated Rank Metric Code (RC) and Convolutional Code (CC) for mitigating impulsive noise.
• To implement and test the proposed coding scheme in a practical environment using SDR.

Main Methods:

• Design and implementation of an RC Encoder + WiFi Mapper block in GNU Radio.
• Simulation of the proposed physical layer based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM).
• Experimental validation using SDR platforms under various impulsive noise conditions.

Main Results:

• The concatenated RC and CC scheme effectively mitigates the bursty nature of impulsive noise.
• Simulations demonstrated high efficiency in noise reduction.
• Experimental results confirmed consistent performance across diverse impulsive voltages and scenarios.

Conclusions:

• The proposed concatenated coding scheme offers a high-performance solution for impulsive noise mitigation in substation communications.
• The use of SDR platforms is crucial for validating communication system performance in real-world environments.
• The developed RC Encoder + WiFi Mapper block is a viable tool for enhancing communication reliability.