Effective Communication Strategies for Noise-Limited Power-Line Channels

Ergodic chaotic parameter modulation (ECPM) has recently been proposed as a viable modulation technique for power-line communications (PLC) due to its robustness to multipath conditions and low complexity in receiver design. While performance of ECPM has been found to be satisfactory in limited noise conditions, performance issues for other hostile challenges in the power-line environment, such as narrowband and impulsive noise, have not been extensively studied for this technique. Numerous studies have been performed on direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DSSS) modulation used in a wireless channel. The technique has been found to be well suited for a mobile environment due to its resistance to multipath fading and inherent narrowband interference suppression capability. For this study, PLC performance is investigated for both the DSSS and ECPM receiver for PLC. A signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) analysis is presented which investigates the noise-limiting properties of the power-line channel. This work provides a detailed insight to communication system performance in a power-line environment that includes the presence of significant narrowband and impulsive noise. It is concluded that while DSSS significantly outperforms ECPM in terms of bit-error rate for a Gaussian white noise-limited channel, the performance of the two techniques is similar for low SNR communication dominated by narrowband or impulsive noise. While the implementation of DSSS is more complex, ECPM is found to be less robust to low-frequency interference

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