Performance Analysis and Enhancements of Narrowband OFDM Powerline Communication Systems

We compare the performance of different powerline communication (PLC) systems under various realistic noise conditions, namely white noise, periodic impulsive noise in the time-domain, and narrowband co-channel interference. We base the study on narrowband (< 500 kHz) PLC based on OFDM in general, with specific focus on two prominent PLC industrial specifications for e-metering applications: PRIME and G3. From the simulation results, for white noise and for higher coding rates we find that the Reed Solomon (RS) outer code used in G3 yields significant gains, but can be improved by adapting the RS code rate to the packet size. For lower coding rates, we do not find significant advantage of adding RS coding. For time-domain impulsive noise, we find that the best performance-complexity tradeoff is obtained by choosing the interleaver size to be somewhere between one symbol (PRIME) and the entire packet (G3). Specifically, it is beneficial to choose an interleaver whose size is comparable to the AC lines period, which is the typically inter-burst duration of impulsive noise. For narrowband interference, both PRIME and G3 offer good performance, but PRIME is preferable because it achieves higher data rates by employing higher order modulation. The immunity to narrowband interference makes PRIME/G3 an attractive candidate for automotive charging applications.