Sparse channel state information acquisition for power line communications

Power line communication (PLC) systems present a “no new wires” solution for the telecommunication access with the additional advantages of ubiquitous availability, easy installation and cost effectiveness. In this paper, by exploiting the parametric sparsity of the PLC channels, we propose a robust sparse channel state information (CSI) acquisition scheme under the framework of Bayesian compressive sensing (CS), which could significantly reduce the pilot overhead and improve the spectral efficiency. Compared to the current sparse CSI acquisition schemes for PLC, including those based on annihilating filter and estimating signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques (ESPRIT) algorithm, the proposed scheme is numerically demonstrated to have better mean squared error (MSE) performance. Furthermore, the proposed method is an appealing solution for practical PLC system, since the performance degradation due to the parameter discretization is not significant.