Baseband transceiver design of a 128-kbps power-line modem for household applications

Communication using power line as a medium provides a convenient and inexpensive way for data transmission and control signaling in the households. In this paper, we introduce a power-line channel model as well as architecture of a spread-spectrum baseband transceiver integrated circuit (IC) for a power-line modem. The modulation and spreading scheme used in the proposed transceiver is M-ary bi-orthogonal keying (MBOK). This transceiver runs at a chipping rate of 256 kHz and provides 128-kbps data rate. Simulation results as well as FPGA emulation verify the effectiveness of the proposed architecture for household data communication.