Abstract

Performance improvement of a power line communication system is presented here considering the noise as a cyclostationary non-white Gaussian random process. Performance of a power line communication system is severely deteriorated by fading and multipath effect. The impulsive noise has been considered time variant, has short duration, random occurrence with a high power spectral density (PSD). It causes bit error in the signal. Using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technique, the effect of impulsive noise and fading can be improved greatly. An analytic approach is presented to evaluate the performance of a power line communication link in the presence of the above limitations. The simulation results show that there is deterioration in system BER due to time and frequency dependence of noise and the degradation is found to be significant at higher bit rates and bandwidth. The system suffers penalty in receiver sensitivity due to non-white nature of the noise process. In this paper, an analytical approach using diversity reception is carried out to examine the performance improvement of a power line channel in fading and impulsive noise. The system bit error rate (BER) is compared numerically for both binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and OFDM system. The BER results show that there is significant improvement in OFDM. Also the performance is remarkably upgraded using diversity reception.

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