Efficient and Reliable Power Line Communications through Coding and Diversity Techniques

Recognizing the resemblance of power line communication (PLC) channels and the frequency-selective radio-frequency (RF) fading channels, this paper considers efficient and reliable PLC through the joint exploitation of coding and diversity techniques. A serial concatenation is constructed which comprises a nonbinary low-density parity-check (LDPC) code, one of the best-performing error correction codes known to date, a higher-order modulation matched to the LDPC code, and the signal space diversity (SSD), a powerful and bandwidth-efficient diversity technique. Soft iterative decoding and equalization is exploited to maximize the performance gain, and simulations on realistic PLC channel models are performed to confirm the efficiency of the proposed scheme. Index Terms Signal Space Diversity, Nonbinary LDPC, Power Line Communication.