BITFCM-OFDM scheme for power-line communication systems

Power-line communications (PLC) is viewed as a good potential solution for smart grid communications because of the established infrastructure around the world. However, power-line was not initially aimed to be used for continuous data communications. Hence, challenging problems may occur when the power-line channel is used as a communication channel. One of the major issues is the (bursty) impulsive noise in the power-line channel. This paper analyzes the system performance of the bit-interleaved time-frequency coded modulation (BITFCM) scheme with an optimal low complexity maximum likelihood (ML) decoding scheme in the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based broadband PLC (BB-PLC) modems. The numerical results illustrate that this proposed scheme improves the system performance of the PLC modems under the bursty impulsive noise environment. Furthermore, the performance of the BITFCM-OFDM scheme can achieve up to 3 dB improvement at bit error rate (BER) of 10^-4 in comparison with the bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM)-OFDM and shows significant improvement compared with the coded OFDM (COFDM). Finally, a blanking nonlinear preprocessor is used at the receiver and further improvement of the BER performance is evaluated.