Advanced physical layer for robust power line communications based on coded modulation

This paper describes the design of advanced physical layer for narrowband power line communications (NB-PLC) based on coded modulation. The coding modulation scheme is described and decoding process based on soft decoding is proposed. Using this innovative scheme, the decoder performs a gain of 3 dB at symbol error rate (SER) equal to 10-3 over traditional receiver with hard decoding. In the implementation analysis, both the digital signal processor (DSP) resources usage and the maximum data rate are considered. It is concluded that a transmission rate of 2.4 kbps is reached for a robust NB-PLC and available resources can be used for full protocol stack implementation.