Advanced Signal Processing for Powerline Communications

In this paper, signal processing techniques to combat the adverse communications environment on power lines are addressed, so as to enable reliable high speed data communications over lowvoltage (LV) power distribution networks for Internet access and in-home/office networking. It is seen that multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA), multiuser detection (MUD), and turbo decoding, having demonstrated their limit-approaching capacity in digital subscriber line (DSL) and wireless communication systems, are readily applied to powerline communications (PLC). In particular, it is argued that these methods can successfully mitigate the influence of the principal impairments in PLC channels, namely time-varying channel attenuation, multipath frequency-selective fading, multiple-access interference, and background noise. Strategies to deal with the most unfavorable noise source, the impulse noise, are also discussed. * This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant CCR-99-80590. + H. Dai was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University. He is now with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NC State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-7511. Phone: (919) 513-0299; Fax: (919) 515-2285; Email: Huaiyu_Dai@ncsu.edu. H. V. Poor is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544. Email: poor@princeton.edu.