Statistical analysis of the Middleton Class-A noise effects on multi-carrier OFDM-based communication system

This paper addresses the effects of Middleton Class-A noise on a binary OFDM-based communication system and proposes a full theoretical study of its statistics. The simulation approach for the Class-A noise, which confirms a previous research work, is based on symbol-wise transmission. Analytical formulations for the statistics of the noise power at the output of the OFDM demodulator and of the error probability are established, and validated by the simulation results. It is concluded that the variance of the impulse noise power, as well as the error floor in the Bit Error Rate (BER) curves are closely related to not only the impulsive index A , but also to the FFT block size N . The error floor decreases when the product of the impulsive index and the FFT block size, AN , increases. The asymptotic value of the error floor is given by the BER for an additive white Gaussian noise channel with noise variance equal to the average variance of the Class-A impulse noise.