Performance improvement of a power line communication system using OFDM under the effect of fading and impulsive noise with diversity reception

Performance of a power line communication system is severely deteriorated by fading and multipath effect. Transmitted signal propagate along a shortest path between the transmitter and the receiver, but additional path (echoes) should also be considered. This will result in a multipath scenario with frequency selective effect. The impulsive noise is considered time variant, has short duration, random occurrence with a high power spectral density (PSD). It causes bit error in the signal. Using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technique, the effect of impulsive noise and fading can be improved greatly. In this paper, an analytical approach using diversity reception is carried out to examine the performance improvement of a power line channel in fading and impulsive noise. The system bit error rate (BER) is compared numerically for both binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and OFDM system. The BER results show that there is significant improvement in OFDM. Also the performance is remarkably upgraded using diversity reception. The BER performance is investigated using multiple antennas and also calculated analytically.