Impulsive Noise Reduction Techniques in Power Line Communication: A Survey and Recent Trends

Power Line Communication (PLC) is a technology that permits data transmission using the electrical networks. In the last few years, research in the area of efficient wired home-networking services and Smart Grid has received a great interest thanks to the already-existing indoor network and the ubiquitous sockets (outlets) inside homes and buildings. However, the power-line mediums present challenging task and provide shaky environment for multimedia (audio, image and video) transmission. As a matter of fact, the noise with the highest impact on multimedia transmission is the impulsive noise with disturbances of bursts of errors. Therefore, there has been an intense research in the area of error-mitigation strategies in PLC, thus the need for such a survey. This survey points out the state-of-the-art techniques, and discusses some key questions regarding the current and future trends related to PLC signal protection strategies.