Receivers for MIMO-PLC channels: Throughput comparison

The demand for very high-quality connectivity for in-home distribution of data and multi-stream entertainment is increasingly motivating the development of high-speed power-line communication technologies offering more than hundreds of Mbit/s. In this paper, to achieve such data rates, power-line multiple-input multiple-output solutions are further investigated. The beamforming scheme, for an ideal Shannon code and continuous constellation sizes, achieves the capacity. However, using a turbo convolutional code and finite QAM constellations, it is shown that beamforming is not always the best solution; in fact, non linear equalization can be an equivalent or better scheme in terms of achievable rate, without the need of providing a feedback channel state information.