Bandwidth Efficient Power Line Communications Based on OFDM

Abstract Power line communications for high data rates using or-thogonal frequency division multiplexing are considered. We regard the situations where no channel information is available at the trans-mitter and where channel information is / is not provided to the re-ceiver. In order to enable a performance evaluation of transmission schemes with different bandwidth efficiencies, a stochastic represen-tation of the channel transfer function is given, which leads to a fad-ing channel model. As an appropriate measure of performance when applying powerful channel coding, the capacity of this special fading channel is calculated. The combination of a large signal constellation and low rate codes in order to obtain a fixed target rate proves to be advantageous both for coherent and bandwidth efficient noncoher-ent transmission over power line. The theoretic considerations are affirmed by means of simulations