Analysis of impulsive noise and multipath effects on broadband power line communications

The impulsive noise and multipath effects are the main reason to cause the bit errors in power line communications. In this paper, the closed form formulas for analysis of the bit error rate (BER) performance of OFDM under the impulsive noise and multipath effects are derived. The accuracy of the derived analytical formulas is verified by computer simulations. Through the analysis, it is shown that OFDM outperforms single carrier under the impulsive noise effect, and that the BER performance of OFDM under the multipath effect depends on the parameters of channel impulse response, data rate and carrier number of OFDM. The error floor of BER performance caused by the inter symbol interference (ISI) and inter carrier interference (ICI) under the multipath effect is also verified. In OFDM system, increasing the number of carriers can improve the BER performance of OFDM under the multipath effect.