Performance Analysis of MC-SS for the Indoor BPLC Systems

power-line networks are promise infrastructure for broadband services provision to end users. However, the network performance is affected by stochastic channel changing which is due to load impedances, number of branches and branched line lengths. It has been proposed that multi-carrier modulations techniques such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), Multi-Carrier Spread Spectrum (MC-SS), wavelet OFDM can be used in such environment. This paper investigates the performance of different indoor topologies of power-line networks that uses MC-SS modulation scheme.It is observed that when a branch is added in the link between sending and receiving end of an indoor channel an average of 2.5dB power loss is found. In additional, when the branch is added at a node an average of 1dB power loss is found. Additionally when the terminal impedances of the branch change from line characteristic impedance to impedance either higher or lower values the channel performances were tremendously improved. For example changing terminal load from characteristic impedance (85 Ω) to 5 Ω the signal to noise ratio (SNR) required to attain the same performances were decreased from 37dB to 24dB respectively. Also, changing the terminal load from channel characteristic impedance (85 Ω) to very higher impedance (1600 Ω) the SNR required to maintain the same performances were decreased from 37dB to 23dB. The result concludes that MC-SS performs better compared with OFDM techniques in all aspects and especially when the channel is terminated in either higher or lower impedances. . Keywords—Communication channel model; Broadband Powerline communication; Branched network; OFDM; Delay Spread, MCSS; impulsive noise; load impedance