Reed-Solomon coding to enhance the reliability of M-FSK in a power line environment

Abstract

M-FSK conforms to the CENELEC standard for power line communications. We investigated the performance of three M-FSK detectors with Reed-Solomon coding on the additive white Gaussian noise channel (AWGN) and an AWGN channel with wideband noise. Furthermore, we developed two schemes to improve communications in the presence of narrowband noise. The first scheme relies on an external mechanism to detect the presence of narrowband noise and this information is then conveyed to the M-FSK demodulator, where it is used to correctly decode the data. For the second scheme, we define the same symbol weight of a codebook. We show how the same symbol weight can assist us in detecting narrowband noise. We then describe two coding techniques for Reed-Solomon codes, which can detect the presence of narrowband noise. When narrowband noise is detected, both schemes try to correctly decode the data.