Mitigating near-field interference in laptop embedded wireless transceivers

Abstract

In laptop and desktop computers, clocks and busses generate significant radio frequency interference (RFI) for the embedded wireless data transceivers. RFI is impulsive in nature. When detecting a signal in additive impulsive noise, Spaulding and Middleton showed a potential improvement in detection of 25 dB at a bit error rate of 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-5</sup> when using a Bayesian detector instead of a standard correlation receiver. In this paper, we model impulsive noise using Middleton class A and symmetric alpha stable (SaS) models. The contributions of this paper are to evaluate (1) the performance vs. complexity of parameter estimation algorithms, (2) the closeness of fit of parameter estimation algorithms to measured RFI data from the computer platform, (3) the communication performance vs. computational complexity tradeoffs for the correlation receiver, Wiener filter, and Bayesian detector, and (4) the performance of myriad filtering in combating RFI interference modeled as SaS interference.