Effects of permittivity of insulating materials on OFDM performance in power line communications

Power line communication provides an attractive alternative to traditional networks both to the user and the public utilities companies as it offers broadband internet access, telephone service, cable television and home automation all of them collectively known as in-home services using the existing power delivery network. However, problems affecting power line communication transmission such as multipath noise, interference, frequency selective fading due to multipath, attenuation delays, and the presence of echoes, impulsive and coloured noise create the need to employ a suitable modulation scheme such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) to counter its adverse effects on signal transmission. This paper analyzes the effects of permittivity of insulating materials on OFDM performance in terms of bit error rate (BER). From simulations, we can see that as the permittivity increases, the BER will become better.