Improved performance of TC-OFDM-PLNC for PLCs using exact derived impulsive noise PDFs

This paper presents an improvement to the end-to-end bit error rate (E2E-BER) performance of turbo-coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing for physical layer network coding (TC-OFDM-PLNC) over power line communication (PLC) channels in the presence of impulsive noise. A novel detection scheme is introduced to transform the transmit signal constellation based on the frequency-domain channel coefficients in order to improve the performance of the turbo decoder at the relay node and end nodes, respectively, on a link-by-link (LBL) basis utilizing newly derived noise probability density functions (PDFs). Moreover, the closed-form expressions of the BER at the relay, end nodes and E2E are derived, in addition to the E2E average BER upper-bound (AUB). Monte Carlo simulation results closely verify the validity of the derived analytical expressions and reveal that the proposed method utilizing exact derived PDFs for impulsive probability α = 10−1 gives coding gains of 4.5 dB and 8.5 dB at Pe = 10−4 for the minimum mean square error (MMSE) and the zero forcing (ZF) equalizers, respectively, compared to the conventional TC-OFDM-PLNC system.