In this paper, a dielectric barrier discharge based electrostatic precipitator powered by a nanosecond pulsed high voltage is investigated experimentally. The first goal is to characterize the electrical behaviour of the discharge in wire-to-square tube configuration. The second one is to analyse the effect of the voltage pulse polarity on submicrometer particle collection efficiency, before to be compared with AC sine and square voltage waveforms. The main results show that the performance of the ESP is better with the positive pulse voltage due to filamentary discharge regime, even if the voltage pulse duration is short compared to the waveform period.