New Transceiver Scheme for OFDM-Based Broadband Power Line Communications

Power line communications (PLC), thanks to the widespread availability of power line infrastructure, is considered as a low-cost alternative for data transmission. Power lines, however, remain hostile environments for communication signal propagation. In this paper, we propose a new transceiver scheme for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based broadband power line communications (BPLC) that implements discrete cosine transform (DCT) and continuous phase modulation (CPM). The proposed transceiver combines the advantages of superior bit error rate (BER) performance of DCT-OFDM, in addition to exploiting the channel frequency diversity and the power efficiency of CPM. Then, the paper presents a chaotic interleaving scheme for the proposed transceiver to further improve the BER performance of BPLC. Moreover, it increases the security of BPLC. The BER performance of BPLC with conventional OFDM and with proposed transceiver scheme (DCT-CPM-OFDM) is evaluated by computer simulations. The obtained results show that, the proposed transceiver scheme is robust to channel impairments while maintaining superior BER performance especially when using chaotic interleaving. As a real application of the proposed transceiver, we check the transmissions of images over a real PL channel. Images with high peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) are received and the proposed transceiver is shown to have a good performance over PL channels. Key-Words: BPLC, OFDM, DCT, CPM, Chaotic interleaving, Equalization.