Analytical bit error rate performance evaluation of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing power line communication system impaired by impulsive and Gaussian channel noise

Abstract

An analytical approach is presented to evaluate the bit error rate (BER) performance of a power line (PL) communication system considering the combined influence of impulsive noise and background PL Gaussian noise. Middleton class-A noise model is considered to evaluate the effect of impulsive noise. The analysis is carried out to find the expression of the signal-to-noise ratio and BER considering orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) with binary phase shift keying modulation with coherent demodulation of OFDM sub-channels. The results are evaluated numerically considering the multipath transfer function model of PL with non-flat power spectral density of PL background noise over a bandwidth of 0.3–100 MHz. The results are plotted for several system and noise parameters and penalty because of impulsive noise is determined at a BER of 10−6. The computed results show that the system suffers significant power penalty because of impulsive noise which is higher at higher channel bandwidth and can be reduced by increasing the number of OFDM subcarriers to some extent. The analytical results conform well with the simulation results reported earlier.