Detection and Mitigation of impulsive interference on OFDM signals based on spectrum sensing, blanking and symbol retransmission

The increasing number of wireless devices and systems operating on the same area leads to significant interference problems that need to be solved. This paper deals with detection and mitigation of the interference generated by an impulsive noise source on an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing system. The idea proposed here is to overcome the interference problem by exploiting the transmission of two replicas of the symbol affected by interference, that are suitably combined at the receiver after a blanking operation of the corrupted samples. An energy detection based sensing scheme is used to reveal the presence of interference. The proposed method allows to efficiently remove the interference without affecting the useful information and exploiting profitably the diversity gain against noise through the soft combining approach. Performance in terms of bit error rate and throughput is compared with the case without mitigation and with the classical blanking method showing a significant improvement. The reduction of the transmission rate, due to the retransmissions, is well compensated by the improvement of the data reliability that leads to an increase of useful data correctly received.