Robust Detection in Power Line Communication for OFDM and non-Rayleigh Fading Channels

This paper presents a receiver implementation that uses robust detection and estimation techniques on top of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing to eliminate various forms of interference associated with the powerline communication channel, namely, non-Rayleigh fading and highly impulsive noise. Computation of error probabilities and Relative Efficiencies with respect to the locally most powerful, maximum likelihood, and optimum parametric detectors demonstrates that the proposed techniques maintain a nearly optimum performance for small signal to noise ratios regardless of the degree of noise contamination and interference. Moreover, the theory of proposed techniques can be easily extended to include operation in a multiuser multiple access network environment.