Hidden outlier noise and its mitigation (original) (raw)
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Out-of-band and adjacent-channel interference reduction by analog nonlinear filters
EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, 2015
In a perfect world, we would have 'brick wall' filters, no-distortion amplifiers and mixers, and well-coordinated spectrum operations. The real world, however, is prone to various types of unintentional and intentional interference of technogenic (man-made) origin that can disrupt critical communication systems. In this paper, we introduce a methodology for mitigating technogenic interference in communication channels by analog nonlinear filters, with an emphasis on the mitigation of out-of-band and adjacent-channel interference. Interference induced in a communications receiver by external transmitters can be viewed as wide-band non-Gaussian noise affecting a narrower-band signal of interest. This noise may contain a strong component within the receiver passband, which may dominate over the thermal noise. While the total wide-band interference seen by the receiver may or may not be impulsive, we demonstrate that the interfering component due to power emitted by the transmitter into the receiver channel is likely to appear impulsive under a wide range of conditions. We give an example of mechanisms of impulsive interference in digital communication systems resulting from the nonsmooth nature of any physically realizable modulation scheme for transmission of a digital (discontinuous) message. We show that impulsive interference can be effectively mitigated by nonlinear differential limiters (NDLs). An NDL can be configured to behave linearly when the input signal does not contain outliers. When outliers are encountered, the nonlinear response of the NDL limits the magnitude of the respective outliers in the output signal. The signal quality is improved in excess of that achievable by the respective linear filter, increasing the capacity of a communications channel. The behavior of an NDL, and its degree of nonlinearity, is controlled by a single parameter in a manner that enables significantly better overall suppression of the noise-containing impulsive components compared to the respective linear filter. Adaptive configurations of NDLs are similarly controlled by a single parameter and are suitable for improving quality of nonstationary signals under time-varying noise conditions. NDLs are designed to be fully compatible with existing linear devices and systems and to be used as an enhancement, or as a low-cost alternative, to the state-of-art interference mitigation methods.
MILCOM 2013 - 2013 IEEE Military Communications Conference, 2013
We introduce algorithms and conceptual circuits for Nonlinear Differential Limiters (NDLs), and outline a methodology for their use to mitigate in-band noise and interference, especially that of technogenic (man-made) origin, affecting various real, complex, and/or vector signals of interest, and limiting the performance of the affected devices and services. At any given frequency, a linear filter affects both the noise and the signal of interest proportionally, and when a linear filter is used to suppress the interference outside of the passband of interest, the resulting signal quality is invariant to the type of the amplitude distribution of the interfering signal, as long as the total power and the spectral composition of the interference remain unchanged. Such a linear filter can be converted into an NDL by introducing an appropriately chosen feedback-based nonlinearity into the response of the filter, and the NDL may reduce the spectral density of particular types of interferences in the signal passband without significantly affecting the signal of interest. As a result, the signal quality can be improved in excess of that achievable by the respective linear filter. The behavior of an NDL filter and its degree of nonlinearity is controlled by a single parameter in a manner that enables significantly better overall suppression of the noise compared to the respective linear filter, especially when the noise contains components of technogenic origin. Adaptive configurations of NDLs are similarly controlled by a single parameter, and are suitable for improving quality of non-stationary signals under time-varying noise conditions. NDLs are designed to be fully compatible with existing linear devices and systems, and to be used as an enhancement, or as a low-cost alternative, to the state-of-art interference mitigation methods.
Digital filters for attenuating interference arriving from a wide range of angles
IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 1992
Digital filters for the off-line multichannel processing of the signals recorded by an array of sensors are derived with the objective of extracting a desired signal arriving from a known direction by attenuating coherent interference arriving from any direction within a wide range of angles and additive random sensor noise. Both the desired signal and coherent interference have arbitrary waveforms. Since the direction of arrival of the interference is unknown, the array response to it is treated as a random variable, and the expected value of its squared magnitude is taken as a minimization criterion in order to attenuate the coherent interference. The output power spectrum in response to the additive random sensor noise is taken as a second criterion. A convex combination of both criteria is minimized subject to an all-pass condition for the desired signal. Simulation results are presented showing the tradeoff between attenuating interference and random noise, the effect of the angular separation between the directions of arrival of the desired signal and interference and the effect of the number of sensors of the array on the output of the array filter.
Practical Implementation of Adaptive Analog Nonlinear Filtering for Impulsive Noise Mitigation
2018 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), 2018
It is well known that the performance of OFDMbased Powerline Communication (PLC) systems is impacted by impulsive noise. In this work, we propose a practical blind adaptive analog nonlinear filter to efficiently detect and mitigate impulsive noise. Specially, we design an Adaptive Canonical Differential Limiter (ACDL) which is constructed from a Clipped Mean Tracking Filter (CMTF) and Quartile Tracking Filters (QTFs). The QTFs help to determine a real-time range that excludes outliers. This range is fed into the CMTF which is responsible for mitigating impulsive noise. The CMTF is a nonlinear analog filter and its nonlinearity is controlled by the aforementioned range. Proper selection of this range ensures the improvement of the desired signal quality in impulsive environment. It is important to note that the proposed ACDL behaves like a linear filter in case of no impulsive noise. In this context, the traditional matched filter construction is modified to ensure distortionless processing of the desired signal. The performance improvement of the proposed ACDL is due to the fact that unlike other nonlinear methods, the ACDL is implemented in the analog domain where the outliers are still broadband and distinguishable. Simulation results in PRIME (OFDM-based narrowband PLC system) demonstrate the superior BER performance of ACDL relative to other nonlinear approaches such as blanking and clipping in impulsive noise environments. Index Terms-Impulsive noise, analog nonlinear filter, adaptive canonical differential limiter (ACDL), clipped mean tracking filter (CMTF); quantile tracking filter (QTF), orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), powerline communication (PLC).
Adaptive noise cancelling: Principles and applications
Proceedings of The IEEE, 1975
This paper describes the concept of adaptive noise cancelling, an alternative method of estimating signals corrupted by additive noise or interference. The method uses a "primary" input containing the corrupted signal and a "reference" input containing noise correlated in some unknown way with the primary noise. The reference input is adaptively filtered and subtracted from the primary input to obtain the signal estimate. Adaptive filtering before subtraction allows the treatment of inputs that are deterministic or stochastic, stationary or time variable. Wiener solutions are developed to describe asymptotic adaptive performance and output signal-to-noise ratio for stationary stochastic inputs, including single and multiple reference inputs. These solutions show that when the reference input is free of signal and certain other conditions are met noise in the primary input can be essentiany eliminated without signal distortion. It is further shown that in treating periodic interference the adaptive noise canceller acts as a notch filter with narrow bandwidth, infinite null, and the capability of tracking the exact frequency of the interference; in this case the canceller behaves as a linear, time-invariant system, with the adaptive filter converging on a dynamic rather than a static solution. Experimental results are presented that illustrate the usefulness of the adaptive noise cancelling technique in a variety of practical applications. These applications include the cancelling of various forms of periodic interference in electrocardiography, the cancelling of periodic interference in speech signals, and the cancelling of broad-band interference in the side-lobes of an antenna array. In further experiments it is shown that a sine wave and Gaussian noise can be separated by using a reference input that is a delayed version of the primary input. Suggested applications include the elimination of tape hum or turntable rumble during the playback of recorded broad-band signals and the automatic detection of very-low-level periodic signals masked by broad-band noise.
EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, 2012
A strong digital communication transmitter in close physical proximity to a receiver of a weak signal can noticeably interfere with the latter even when the respective channels are tens or hundreds of megahertz apart. When time domain observations are made in the signal chain of the receiver between the first mixer and the baseband, this interference is likely to appear impulsive. The impulsive nature of this interference provides an opportunity to reduce its power by nonlinear filtering, improving the quality of the receiver channel. This article describes the mitigation, by a particular nonlinear filter, of the impulsive out-of-band (OOB) interference induced in High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) by WiFi transmissions, protocols which coexist in many 3G smartphones and mobile hotspots. Our measurements show a decrease in the maximum error-free bit rate of a 1.95 GHz HSDPA receiver caused by the impulsive interference from an OOB 2.4 GHz WiFi transmission, sometimes down to a small fraction of the rate observed in the absence of the interference. We apply a nonlinear SPART filter to recover a noticeable portion of the lost rate and maintain an error-free connection under much higher levels of the WiFi interference than a receiver that does not contain such a filter. These measurements support our wider investigation of OOB interference resulting from digital modulation, which appears impulsive in a receiver, and its mitigation by nonlinear filters.