Performance analysis of OFDM modulation on indoor broadband PLC channels

Indoor broadband power-line communications is a suitable technology for home networking applications. In this context, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is the most widespread modulation technique. It has recently been adopted by the ITU-T Recommendation G.9960 and is also used by mo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:EURASIP journal on advances in signal processing 2011-09, Vol.2011 (1), p.1-12, Article 78
Main Authors: Cortés, José Antonio, Díez, Luis, Cañete, Francisco Javier, Sánchez-Martínez, Juan José, Entrambasaguas, José Tomás
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Broadband
Carriers
Channels
Distortion
Engineering
Indoor
Mathematical analysis
Modulation
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
Quantum Information Technology
Signal,Image and Speech Processing
Spintronics
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Summary:Indoor broadband power-line communications is a suitable technology for home networking applications. In this context, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is the most widespread modulation technique. It has recently been adopted by the ITU-T Recommendation G.9960 and is also used by most of the commercial systems, whose number of carriers has gone from about 100 to a few thousands in less than a decade. However, indoor power-line channels are frequency-selective and exhibit periodic time variations. Hence, increasing the number of carriers does not always improves the performance, since it reduces the distortion because of the frequency selectivity, but increases the one caused by the channel time variation. In addition, the long impulse response of power-line channels obliges to use an insufficient cyclic prefix. Increasing its value reduces the distortion, but also the symbol rate. Therefore, there are optimum values for both modulation parameters. This article evaluates the performance of an OFDM system as a function of the number of carriers and the cyclic prefix length, determining their most appropriate values for the indoor power-line scenario. This task must be accomplished by means of time-consuming simulations employing a linear time-varying filtering, since no consensus on a tractable statistical channel model has been reached yet. However, this study presents a simpler procedure in which the distortion because of the frequency selectivity is computed using a time-invariant channel response, and an analytical expression is derived for the one caused by the channel time variation.
ISSN:1687-6180
1687-6172
1687-6180
DOI:10.1186/1687-6180-2011-78