A low cost STBC-OFDM system with improved reliability for power line communications

This paper outlines the use of symbol repetition technique together with space time block code orthogonally frequency division multiplexing (STBC-OFDM) scheme for power line communication (PLC) when the receiver has complete knowledge about the channel state information. Due to redundancy in the proposed technique, a low-complex FFT can be implemented. Also, the way as the symbol diversity is explored, which can offer similar improvement found in space diversity, can improve the performance of STBC-OFDM scheme if the PLC channel is frequency-selective and corrupted by impulsive like noise, such as the additive impulsive Gaussian noise (AIGN). Simulation results reveal that the STBC-OFDM with a simple symbol repetition technique offers an enhanced reliability, compared to a regular STBC-OFDM when Alamouti code is considered.