Abstract
The indoor narrowband power line communication
(NB-PLC) suffers from noise impairments, which emanate from
several end-user electrical devices connected across the PLC
channel. These noise impairments result into burst errors, which
consequently lead to data corruption. Therefore, in order to
implement robust communication techniques that will thrive on
the noisy PLC channel, a full knowledge and modeling of the
noise that exists on the NB-PLC channel is inevitable. This paper
thus reports a First-order Markov modeling of NB-PLC channel
noise, based on experimental measurements. For the modeling,
BPSK, DBPSK, QPSK and DQPSK modulation schemes were
implemented using Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP).
The resulting channel models are useful for improving the
robustness of the above modulation schemes as well as designing
forward error correction techniques for mitigating the effect of
noise impairments. The results are also useful in optimizing
NB-PLC system design, thereby, enhancing the accuracy and
improving the overall PLC system performance.