# Impulsive Noise Mitigation in Underwater Acoustic Communication Systems: Experimental Studies

## TL;DR

This paper evaluates an analog nonlinear preprocessor (MANP) for mitigating impulsive noise in underwater acoustic OFDM systems, demonstrating superior performance over digital methods through experimental under-ice data.

## Contribution

The study introduces and experimentally validates a memoryless analog nonlinear preprocessor that outperforms digital methods in impulsive noise mitigation for underwater acoustics.

## Key findings

- MANP outperforms digital nonlinear methods like blanking and clipping.
- Experimental data shows improved BER performance in under-ice environments.
- MANP effectively suppresses impulsive noise in real underwater conditions.

## Abstract

Impulsive noise is a major impediment to orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) based underwater acoustic (UWA) communications. In this work, we evaluate the performance of a memoryless analog nonlinear preprocessor (MANP) that is used to mitigate outliers. The proposed MANP exhibits intermittent nonlinearity only in the presence of the impulsive noise and suppresses the power of outliers based on their amplitudes. Since the outliers are distinguishable in the analog domain prior to anti-aliasing filtering, the MANP outperforms its digital counterparts in all scenarios. Experimental results using data collected in an under-ice environment, demonstrate the superior BER performance of our approach relative to classical nonlinear approaches such as blanking and clipping.