Abstract
This article gives a discussion on impulse noise, its
models and how it affects communications systems. We discuss
the different impulse noise models in the literature, looking at
their similarities and differences in communications systems.
The impulse noise models discussed are memoryless (Middleton
Class A and Bernoulli-Gaussian), 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 multicarrier
(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.