Polar Codes and a M-ary Modulation-Based OFDM-PLC System

Abstract

Power Line Communication (PLC) serves as a medium for communication over power lines, utilizing the existing power grid for information transmission. It offers a low-cost, highly scalable signal transmission method and has the potential to become the preferred technology for providing broadband in smart homes, offices, and smart grids. However, noise in the power line channel, especially impulse noise, seriously affects the communication quality of PLC. In this paper, we establish an OFDM-PLC system with higher-order modulation and polar codes. The higher-order QAM or APSK modulation technique is employed to increase the signal transmission rate and the system performance is analyzed. To combat the impulse noise in the PLC channel, we first model it using a superposition of multi-damping sinusoidal functions and then introduce the polar coding scheme to suppress the impulse noise in the system, thereby improving the transmission reliability. Simulation results verify that the proposed polar coding scheme based on the OFDM-PLC system can improve the Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of PLC channel transmission under impulse interference.