Single Carrier and Multicarrier Digital Modulation Performance Under Impulsive and Background Noise: BPSK, QPSK, 8PSK and 8QAM

Power Line Communications (PLC) is positioning itself as the most natural communication technology for smart grid since it uses the existing power cables. However, the PLC channel still suffers from the devastating effects of impulsive noise. This paper investigates the effect of random impulsive noise on PSK, QAM and OFDM. The performance analyses results of M-PSK, 8-QAM and BPSK-OFDM are presented, showing the devastating effect of impulsive noise. We then go further by comparing the performance of BPSK to that of BPSK-OFDM and QPSK, 8-PSK to that of 8-QAM, showing that depending on the impulsive noise probability, 8-QAM outperforms 8-PSK and BPSK, BPSK-OFDM and QPSK have similar performance when the impulsive noise probability equal to 1 and subjected to the same impulse noise power.