Performance of polar coding for the power line communications in the presence of impulsive noise

Abstract

In this study, the authors propose a polar coding (PC) scheme for the power line communication (PLC) system to cope with the impulsive noise and thereby promote the transmission performance. This new error-correcting coding scheme is essentially inspired on a novel conception of channel polarisation. To be specific, via recursively channel combing and splitting, a group of channels with ideal transmission conditions, that is having a capacity of 1, will be constructed to carry the useful information, while the other band sub-channels bear useless information. The decoding performance of PC under realistic impulsive noises is investigated under the condition that the impulsive noise is modelled by a well-known Middleton Class-A model. To mitigate the error propagation caused by sudden strong impulsive noises and further enhance the decoding performance, a matrix interleave operator is integrated. Simulations validate the suggested PC scheme in PLC systems. Compared with another commonly used low-density parity-check (LDPC) coding scheme, the suggested PC scheme, which has the low complexity, can significantly improve the bit error rate (BER) performance of PLC transmissions with impulsive interference. The PC scheme, as demonstrated by simulation results, can be of great importance to practical PLC systems.