Research on the memory order of the power-line communication channel

As a memory channel, power-line communication (PLC) channel can be modeled by the finite states Morkov model. The memory order in an finite states Morkov model is a key parameter, which is not solved in PLC systems yet. In the paper, the mutual information is used as a measure of the dependence between the different symbols, treated as the received scalar network analyzer, or amplitude of the current channel symbol or that of previous symbols. The joint distribution probabilities of the envelopes in PLC systems are computed based on the multi-path channel model, which is commonly used in PLC. With the first-order Markovian assumption, we confirm that given the information of the symbol immediately preceding the current one, any other previous symbol is independent of the current one in PLC systems. The field test is also performed to model the received OFDM signals with the help of autoregressive model. The results show that the first-order autoregressive model is enough to model the fading channel in PLC systems, which means the amount of uncertainty remaining in the current symbol should be negligible, given the information corresponding to the immediately preceding one. Copyright (C) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.