System design considerations for high data rate communications over multi-wire overhead powerlines

Broadband powerline communications over multi-wire overheard lines using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is considered in this paper. From earlier investigations, it is known that this channel suffers with multipath fading and frequency selectivity. Nevertheless, the calculated channel capacity limit promises very high data rates over this channel, subject to simple fixes. Enhancement techniques, such as coding can help an OFDM system to achieve this limit as close as possible. The smart use of coding and power allocation in OFDM will be useful to get the desired performance at higher data rates. These theoretic facts are confirmed by means of computer simulations.