Performance of bit-interleaved coded OFDM in power line communications with impulsive noise

Noise in the power line channel can not be described by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). This channel suffers from impulsive noise and other narrow-band interferences. Impulsive noise, in particular, can degrade the performance of OFDM-based power line communication (PLC) systems significantly. Therefore, channel coding is important to combat the impairments in this hostile medium. Interleaving can be integrated with coding to allow for a better exploitation of the capabilities of a coding scheme. In this paper, we study and simulate the performance of bit-interleaved convolutionally coded OFDM over PLC channels in the presence of impulsive noise. For our simulations, we adopt a widely accepted and practically proven channel model for broadband PLC. Three noise scenarios, namely ¿heavily disturbed¿, ¿medium disturbed¿ and ¿weakly disturbed¿, that are based on practical measurements are used to study the system performance by means of computer simulations.