Permutation coding with differential quinary phase shift keying for power line communication

Permutation coding (PC) has been known to be effective in combating power line channel impairments, when used in concatenation with other channel coding schemes like convolutional or Reed Solomon (RS) codes, using FSK, PSK or DPSK as the modulator. We hereby report the development of a modified DPSK modulator, called differential quinary PSK (DQuiPSK), with only 5 constellations, to improve the performance of permutation coded DPSK-OFDM modulation for power line communication (PLC) purposes. This combination is, therefore, termed an RS-PC-DQuiPSK-OFDM scheme, with RS being used as an outer code. To implement this over power line, universal software radio peripherals, which are software defined radio hardware, originally designed for radio communications, were used together with narrowband coupling circuits, to interface with the power line. Simulations and practical implementation results show the strength and competitive performance of our scheme over the conventional convolutional coded D8PSK-OFDM scheme specified in the narrowband PLC standard.