Abstract
Noise and attenuation, in the form of frequency disturbance,
impulsive noise, additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN)
and frequency selective fading, are the major setbacks in power
line communications (PLC). In order to effectively combat this
challenge, we thus report the development and implementation of
a specially coded M-ary differential phase shift keying modulation
scheme on narrowband PLC channel. The coding aspect involves
the concatenation of conventional Reed Solomon (RS) code with
cyclic permutation coding (CPC), resulting in what is termed
RS-CPC scheme. The CPC employed in this work maps the
output bits of a binary RS code onto non-binary CPC symbols, in
a cyclic manner, with a view to improving the distance between
two different sets of mapped symbols. For implementation over
230 V AC power line, software defined radio hardware, called
the universal software radio peripherals (USRPs), were used,
together with narrowband coupling circuits, to couple the signal
to and receive it from the power line. Both by simulation and
implementation, our scheme outperforms the conventional Reed
Solomon-convolutional coding (RS-CC) specified in the G3-PLC
standard. An added advantage is that our scheme is easier to
implement.