A nonlinear equalization method based on multilayer perceptron for OFDM power-line communication

A high-speed data-communication over low-voltage power line is currently an active field of broad application. Power-line communication (PLC), based on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), is developing rapidly. OFDM with an appropriately selected guard interval is considered as one of the most effective ways to eliminate the intersymbol interference of high-rate signal transmission. However, it is unable to deal with the orthogonality degradation between the subchannels due to the time-variant characteristics of the multipath power-line channels, which are known as the interchannel interference problem. It is, therefore, necessary to introduce a nonlinear channel equalizer. In this paper, a multilayer perceptron scheme trained with a mean square error (MSE) criterion is proposed for the design of the nonlinear channel equalizer. The performances of the traditional linear equalizer and the proposed nonlinear one are compared. In order to evaluate the robustness of the proposed approach against the channel distortion, experimental measurements are made in a real PLC network. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified via the experiments on the test system.