US Patent 7522513 Method and system for receiving a multi-carrier signal

Method and system for tolerating impulsive burst noise in pilot based OFDM systems, especially using DVB-T standard. The method contains following steps: 1) recognition of the impulse position and possibly length in the time domain symbol, 2) blanking of those samples of the symbol where significant amount of impulse noise is present, 3) calculating the first estimate of the received signal from the blanked symbol, 4) using a prior information (guard band carriers, pilot carriers) an estimate of the blanked symbol is calculated using inverse FFT on the differences of the observed carrier values from the known values in the frequency domain, 5) correction values for the frequency domain carriers are derived taking the FFT of the restored time domain samples, 6) finally the corrected estimate of the received symbol is derived by summing the correction values of step 5 to the first estimate of carriers derived in step 3. The method allows correction of relatively long bursts of impulse noise with minor degradation. The method provides considerably reliable data reception in broadcast systems.