High performance binary LDPC-coded OFDM systems over indoor PLC channels

Abstract

Power line communication (PLC) technology is actually among the most renowned technologies for home environments due to their low-cost installation opportunities. In this study, the bit error rate (BER) performances of binary low-density parity check (LDPC) coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems have been considered over indoor PLC channels. Performances comparison of diverse soft and hard decision LDPC decoder schemes such as Min-Sum (MS), weighted bit flipping (WBF), gradient descent bit-flip (GDBF), noisy gradient descent bit-flip (NGDBF) and its few variants including the single-bit NGDBF (S-NGDBF), multi-bit NGDBF (M-NGDBF) and smoothed-multi-bit NGDBF (SM-NGDBF) decoders were examined in the modeled network. To evaluate the BER performance analyses three different PLC channel scenarios were generated by using new and more realistic PLC channel model proposal were also employed. All of the simulations performed in Canete’s PLC channel model showed that remarkable performance improvement can be achieved by using short-length LDPC codes. Especially, the improvements are striking when the MS or SM-NGDBF decoding algorithms are employed on the receiver side.