Broadband PLC Channel Equalization in the Frequency Domain Based on Complementary Sequences

MOYA, S.; HADAD, M.; FUNES, M.; DONATO, P. G.; CARRICA, D.

IET COMMUNICATIONS

INST ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY-IET

Año: 2016 vol. 10 p. 1605 - 1613

1751-8628

Multipath channels, like power lines, have a periodic time-variant response that impacts on data transmission over the grid. Power Line Communications (PLC) performance, in the context of a cyclic prefix single carrier modulation scheme, can benefit from frequency domain equalization techniques. This work proposes a frequency domain dynamic characterization and equalization algorithm based on the properties of Complementary Sequences (CS). This proposal takes advantage of some CS properties to reduce the complexity of the equalization algorithm by performing all the operations in the frequency domain, and without the necessity of noise/variance estimators. The proposal is compared to some well-known methods like Zero Forcing (ZF) and Minimum Mean-Square Error (MMSE) through the transmission of data under three different PLC channels. Bit Error Rate (BER) is also measured using Middleton Class A impulse noise model (MCA) and the performance of all methods is finally evaluated under a time-variant PLC channel model showing the importance of dynamic equalization on PLC systems. Reported computational resources and simulations show that the proposal works four time faster than MMSE and improves the BER performance by up to 4dB with regard to other methods. In addition, the proposed identification algorithms shows to work properly even in PLC channels with attenuations higher than 40dB and severe impulse noise scenarios.