OFDM/OQAM performance analysis under asynchronous impulsive noise

Impulsive noise remains one of the important issues for data transmission over power lines. Many studies show that, compared to the single carrier modulation scheme, the OFDM not only fights against the channel time dispersion, but also helps to mitigate the noxious effects of such kind of noise. The OFDM/OQAM is an alternative multicarrier scheme that exhibits a higher theoretical spectral efficiency than OFDM with cyclic prefix (CP-OFDM) and may furthermore, be well-localized in time and frequency. In this paper, an investigation of the OFDM/OQAM performance in impulsive environment is done. The influence of the prototype filter and the number of carriers on the bit error rate (BER) performance is analyzed. The results are compared to those obtained with the OFDM scheme. Finally, an optimization of a clipping non-linearity is evaluated.