Analysis of the effect of impulse noise on multicarrier and single carrier QAM systems

This paper first shows the equivalence of the Bernoulli-Gaussian impulse noise model in the discrete time domain to the continuous-time model of Poisson arriving delta functions with random area distributed according to the power Rayleigh probability density function. This equivalence is then used to develop a closed form expression for the probability of error for single carrier QAM that is easily evaluated unlike earlier work in this area that required the evaluation of the truncated Fourier-Bessel series. Furthermore, the performance of multicarrier modulation (MCM) is also analyzed using the same impulse noise model and it is shown that in most cases MCM performs better than single carrier systems, specifically when the probability of an impulse is not too high and the impulse power is moderate.