Differentially Coherent Detection for Multicarrier Spread Spectrum Communication over Power Lines

Power line communications (PLC) are gaining popularity in smart grid applications. However, current PLC systems with high complexity and sensitiveness to impulse noise and carrier frequency error remain difficult to employ for robust communications over highly unpredictable harsh power line channel. This paper presents a low complexity and high flexibility multicarrier (MC) spread spectrum (SS) system by frequency division multiple access (FDMA) approach to cope with hostile environment with multipath frequency-selective fading. With the number of subcarriers given by the length of sampled data block, experimental results demonstrate that the developed system can effectively combat the channel effects by enabling differentially coherent detection between the subcarriers with variable channel spacing, leading to robust communications.