OFDM modem design and implementation for narrowband Powerline communication

Automatic meter reading (AMR) technology allows energy suppliers to exploit their own infrastructure to bill their customers in an efficient and economical way using Power Line Communications (PLC). At this moment, new applications and services are required by market such as load and alarm management, remote monitoring and disconnection, etc. Thus, narrowband PLC modems should satisfy these services, provide high throughput and keep a low cost. In this paper, we propose a design methodology of a narrowband OFDM based PLC modem, its implementation on embedded processor and optimization of three building blocks: FFT, Viterbi, and convolutional encoder.