Differential Chaos Shift Keying: A Robust Modulation Scheme for Power-Line Communications

The past few years have witnessed a tremendous development in power-line communications (PLCs) for the realization of smart grids. Since power lines were not originally intended for conveying high-frequency signals, any communication over these lines would be exposed to severe adversarial factors, such as interference, impulsive, and phase noise. This elucidates the importance of employing robust modulation techniques and motivates research in this direction. Indeed, the aim of this brief is to propose a differential chaos shift keying (DCSK) modulation scheme as a potential candidate for smart grid communication networks. This DCSK class of noncoherent modulation is very robust against linear and nonlinear channel distortions. More importantly, the demodulation process can be carried out without any channel estimator at the receiver side. In this work, we analyze the bit error rate performance of DCSK over multipath PLC channels in which phase, background, and impulsive noise are present. A simulator is developed to verify the performance of the proposed DCSK against direct sequence code division multiple access and direct sequence differential phase shift keying. The results presented in this work prove the advantages of this low-cost noncoherent modulation technique for PLC systems over its rivals.