Impulse Noise Mitigation Using Subcarrier Coding of OFDM-MFSK Scheme in Powerline Channel

The powerline channel is classified as harsh due to its original design which was not intended for communication. Permutation codes have shown to combine efficiently with ${M}$-ary frequency shift keying (MFSK) in order to mitigate the effects of impulse noise in the powerline channel. The use of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with ${M}$-ary frequency shift keying (OFDM-MFSK) also allows non-coherent detection and is efficient in environments where estimation of the channel is challenging. This paper proposes an OFDM-MFSK based subcarrier coding in the frequency domain using permutation codes. This scheme aims at improving the bit error rate (BER) performance by mitigating against the effects of impulse noise in the powerline channel. Subcarrier detection using the soft information from the received subcarriers is also possible, thereby increasing the BER while reducing the complexity of the scheme for a large number of subcarriers.