Performance Analysis of OFDM-PLC Systems

It is well known that asynchronous impulsive noise is the main source of distortion that drastically affects the power line communications (PLC) performance. In this paper, the bit error rate (BER)performance of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system under the impulsivenoise is theoretically analyzed in terms of closed form formulas. Through the analysis, it is shown that OFDM can mitigate the adverse effect of the impulsive noise and only the heavily disturbed impulsive noise will interfere the BER performance of the OFDM system. In this paper, we consider a pulsetrain model and propose a thorough analysis of the impact of impulsive noise parameters, namely impulse width and amplitude as well as inter-arrival time, on the BER performance of OFDM broadband PLC. A comparison with the conventional Bernoulli-Gaussian (BG) impulsive noise model exhibits the difference between the two approaches, showing the necessity of more realistic models

Keywords:

Bit Error Rate , OFDM , Power Line Communication , Impulsive Noise