Performance analysis of a power line communication system employing selection combining in correlated log-normal channels and impulsive noise

The authors analyse an L-channel selection combining (SC) scheme for a power line communication (PLC) system with binary phase-shift keying. The focus is on improving the reliability in data transfer of the system instead of improving the data rate. To enhance the reliability in data transfer, multiple PLC channels are used to send the same information-bearing signal to the receiver. The L PLC channels are subject to log-normal fading, which is modelled by a multivariate log-normal distribution with an exponential correlation. The channels are also corrupted by additive impulsive noise as well as thermal noise. To consider the effect of both types of noises, they adopt a Gaussian mixture noise model, in which the additive noise samples are taken from a Bernoulli-Gaussian process. The system performance is evaluated in terms of the average bit error rate and the average channel capacity, for which approximate closed form expressions are derived. Numerical results showing the impact of the number of PLC channels, the amount of correlation, the noise scenarios, and the fading environments on the performance are presented. The authors´ results show that the performance improves with increasing number of PLC channels; however, the amount of improvement reduces with increasing channel correlation.