Capacity Analysis for Indoor PLC Using Different Multi-Carrier Modulation Schemes

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)/discrete multi-tone (DMT) has been proposed as a suitable modulation for power-line communications. However, its drawbacks, e.g., bad frequency localization and spectrum efficiency loss due to cyclic prefix (CP) appending, are also obvious. On the other hand, the hermitian symmetric (HS) version of OFDM/OQAM modulation has been presented as a good alternative to DMT. It retains full spectrum efficiency (i.e., no CP appending) and has good time-frequency localization. But, its weakness of remaining interference leads people to hesitate to choose an appropriate scheme between DMT and HS-OQAM. This paper addresses the analysis of the tradeoff between spectrum efficiency and interference of these two schemes in terms of transmission capacity and finally gives a reference signal-to-noise ratio threshold w.r.t. the corresponding channel environment to decide which scheme is better over the other.