Performances of coded OFDM/OQAM over PLC impaired by impulsive and colored noise

Power wires are now recognized to be of interest for many applications such as indoor or in-vehicle communications. This medium usually presents a frequency selectivity behavior, with very slow variations in time. Moreover, data transmissions encounter significant impairments such as impulsive and radio disturbances. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a well dedicated modulation for such a frequency selective channel, obviously because of the simplicity of the required equalization. Advanced Multicarrier Modulation (MCM) schemes like OFDM/Offset-Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (OFDM/OQAM) can also be used as an alternative to OFDM, since they better achieve the time and frequency localization. This paper evaluates the performances of coded OFDM/OQAM over power line channels in the presence of asynchronous impulsive disturbances and colored background noise. The paper also analyzes some approximations of the Log-Likelihood Ratio (LLR) metrics for practical LLR derivation.