A robust metric for soft-output detection in the presence of class-A noise

Digital communications over channels impaired by impulse noise are considered. We first address the problem from an information-theoretical viewpoint, discussing the performance limits imposed by the channel model. Then, we describe and compare a couple of practical communication schemes employing powerful channel codes and iterative decoding, with focus on a very simple and robust detection scheme that does not require the estimation of the statistics of the impulse noise.