Maximum-likelihood block decoding of noncoherent coded FSK for the CENELEC band

This paper addresses low frequency range power line communications (PLC), where the transmitters are output voltage and bandwidth limited. We investigate the block decoding of coded non-coherent 2-FSK modulation for the transmission over the impulsive noise channel with narrow band interference. The maximum-likelihood (ML) receiver is analyzed and suboptimum decoding algorithms improving the bit error rate performance are derived. Furthermore, an efficient transmission method of combining Reed Solomon (RS) coding with run length limited (RLL) codes is incorporated to obtain coding gain without expanding the bandwidth. Simulation results show the improved performance of the proposed RS-RLL scheme. Our coding/modulation scheme is in agreement with the existing CENELEC standard.