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

Abstract

Power Line Communication (PLC), which is a competitive technique especially for in-home applications, faces impulsive noise together with unstable channel characteristics. These two unpredictable factors make the communication on power lines difficult, which may reduce the efficiency of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), the selected modulation standard for PLC. There exists various channel estimators for PLC in the literature. The former techniques assume the channel noise is white Gaussian as in the wireless multipath, while the newer ones model the corrupted noise as impulsive which results with more complex receivers. In this study, the performance of the Maximum A-Posteriori (MAP) estimator proposed for additive white Gaussian noise channels is evaluated for PLC systems with OFDM under the constraint of impulsive noise. For the simulations multipath channel data is taken from the literature and Middleton Class A impulsive noise model is used. The results show that the MAP estimator which is designed with the assumption of white Gaussian noise has a satisfactory performance even under heavy impulsive noise.