Performance evaluation of multiple branch PLC system with Laplacian impulsive noise

Due to the requirement of high speed applications, power utilities have come out to supply data communication over power lines to the customer. In this paper, we examine a single user multi-branch power line communication (PLC) system with binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) data and diversity combining schemes. The key idea behind this is to study the performance of a multiple wire based physical layer PLC system under the effect impulsive noise and the fading. Hence, we do not consider the effect of background noise in this paper. Further, we assume that all the channels are independent, noninterfering, and identically distributed with Rayleigh fading. The impulsive noise is modelled with Laplace distribution. The user sends the information signal over the multiple wires and the receiver utilizes the diversity combining techniques such as selection combining (SC) or maximal ratio combining (MRC) at its end to improve the reliability of the PLC system. We obtain a closed form approximation of the bit error rate (BER) and the outage probability of the considered PLC system with both the combining techniques. The results have been verified through simulations.