Bandwidth efficient power line communications based on OFDM

Power line communications for high data rates using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing are considered. We regard the situations where no channel information is available at the transmitter and where channel information is/is not provided to the receiver. In order to enable a performance evaluation of transmission schemes with different bandwidth efficiencies, a stochastic representation of the channel transfer function is given, which leads to a fading channel model. As an appropriate measure of performance when applying powerful channel coding, the capacity of this special fading channel is calculated. The combination of a large signal constellation and low rate codes in order to obtain a fixed target rate proves to be advantageous both for coherent and bandwidth efficient noncoherent transmission over power line. The theoretic considerations are affirmed by means of simulations.