Eliminating Man-Made Noise from PLC Systems by Taking Advantage of the Masked Tones

Most man-made noise (MMN) in communication channels occupies wide bandwidth. In Power Line Communications (PLC) transmissions, MMN affects the whole band to a greater or lesser extent too. PLC systems avoid transmitting at those frequency portions (masked tones) corresponding to several radio services in order not to interfere with them. Whenever an MMN pulse arrives at the receiver, its energy also enters the masked tones where there is no PLC signal; this paper expounds a novel procedure to eliminate MMN at PLC receivers, which consists of extracting the spectral components in the masked tones and from this information to reconstruct the MMN pulses in order to subtract them from the time domain signal sequence.