An investigation of the effects of impulsive noise and channel distortion in narrow band power line communication

One of the major impediments in a Power Line Communication (PLC) channel is the unpredictable impulsive noise (IN) which originates from varied sources. Its effects in the presence of channel distortion causes bit flip error among other problems, in narrow band power line communication (NB-PLC) and thus the system will be prone to error in its command or monitoring purposes. In this paper, the effects of IN superimposed on the channel distortion in the transmission of unmodulated and different digitally modulated data signal are studied. The PLC channels transmitted signals (i.e. data and power) and IN were modeled. For each modulation scheme, the bit error rate (BER) was estimated at the receiving end and the performances were compared based on the estimated BER. The results of these comparison showed that the transmission of the modulated signal had lower BER when compared with the transmission of the unmodulated data signal. Among the modulated signals, the phase shift keying (PSK) out performs the other modulation type like amplitude shift keying (ASK) and frequency shift keying (FSK). This result agrees with literature.