Performance of MAP Channel Estimator in Power Line Communication with OFDM under Impulsive Noise

Abstract

Power Line Communication (PLC), which is acompetitive technique especially for in-home applications, facesimpulsive noise together with unstable channel characteristics.These two unpredictable factors make the communication onpower lines difficult, which may reduce the efficiency ofOrthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), theselected modulation standard for PLC. There exists variouschannel estimators for PLC in the literature. The formertechniques assume the channel noise is white Gaussian as in thewireless multipath, while the newer ones model the corruptednoise as impulsive which results with more complex receivers. Inthis study, the performance of the Maximum A-Posteriori (MAP)estimator proposed for additive white Gaussian noise channels isevaluated for PLC systems with OFDM under the constraint ofimpulsive noise. For the simulations multipath channel data istaken from the literature and Middleton Class A impulsive noisemodel is used. The results show that the MAP estimator which isdesigned with the assumption of white Gaussian noise has asatisfactory performance even under heavy impulsive noise.