Digital communications over channels impaired by impulse noise are addressed. We adopt a two-state Markov model that allows to describe the typical bursty nature of the impulse noise, in contrast to the memoryless models generally considered in the literature. For this channel, we evaluate the achievable information rate and propose a couple of practical communication systems based on powerful codes and iterative receivers. Moreover, we discuss the effectiveness of the considered receivers in

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... rms of performance/latency tradeoff as well as in terms of robustness to erroneous channel estimations. The proposed schemes are shown to perform fairly close to the theoretical limits, and significantly better than the conventional schemes employing memoryless detection. Index Terms-Impulse noise, Markov channels, maximum-aposteriori symbol detection, achievable information rate, lowdensity parity-check codes. Dario Fertonani (S'06) was born in Mantua, Italy, in 1980. He received the Dr.Ing. degree (cum laude) in telecommunications engineering in 2004 and the Ph.D degree in Information Technology in 2008, both from the University of Parma, Italy. Then, he held a post-doc position at the Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. Currently, he is a Research Associate at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy. His research interests include various topics in digital communications and information theory, with particular interest on design issues related to iterative detection/decoding over channels with memory and channels with impulse noise. He is coauthor of publications on international journals and proceedings of international conferences, and was one of the recipients of the student travel grant for IEEE ICC 2008. Also, he participated in research projects funded by the European Space Agency and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Giulio Colavolpe (S'96-M'00)