Noise modeling and OFDM based receiver design in power-line communication

Noise Modeling and OFDM Based Receiver Design in Power-Line Communication Electromagnetic interference, man-made noise and multi-path effects are the main causes of bit errors in power line communication (PLC). In this paper, frequency domain characteristics of the power-line noise are investigated. The noise amplitude distribution of each individual frequency in the spectrum is analyzed and a suitable noise amplitude distribution model is proposed. A soft-demodulation based receiver for the proposed noise model is derived and its performance is analyzed. In simulations, Zimmermann and Dostert's wellknown PLC channel model is used. Correctness of the channel simulations is verified by measurements. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) with convolutional coding and soft-Viterbi decoding is used to evaluate the performance of the receiver under the proposed noise model in terms of the bit-error-rate (BER) for different signal-to-noise ratio values. It is shown that instead of using a Gaussian optimal receiver in an OFDM system for the whole spectrum, utilizing Generalized Gaussian Distribution based receivers with appropriate shape information for each individual subchannel significantly increases BER performance.