Probabilistic Amplitude Shaping in Power Line Communication

Power Line Communication (PLC) is a communication method that using the existing power line network as the information transmission carrier. Medium voltage (MV) underground power line can provide functions such as power quality measurement and remote control of the electrical network. However, due to the complex channel and noise model, the transmission reliability in PLC suffers a lot. As probabilistic amplitude shaping (PAS) shows a significant improvement in frame error rate (FER) in wireless channels, we aim to apply PAS in MV power line channels in this paper to evaluate its performance. First, the MV power line channel is modeled as a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel in the presence of impulsive noise and background noise. Next, we introduce the basic idea of PAS and implement it with bipolar amplitude shift keying (ASK) modulation and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Finally, we compare the FER with or without PAS in the power line channel. Numerical results show that, to achieve the same FER, adopting PAS in the power line channel can save 40% transmitting power under 64-QAM modulation.