OFDM vs FBMC: A comparative analysis for broadband-PLC

This paper presents a comparative analysis of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and filterbank multi-carrier (FBMC) transmission schemes for broad band power line communication (BB-PLC). The BB-PLC channel is modeled by a Bernoulli-Gaussian process and the closed-form expressions for average bit error rate (BER) and average channel capacity are derived for the two schemes. Although, the two schemes are identical in-terms of the average BER performance, it is observed from the numerical results that spectral efficiency of FBMC is much superior than that of OFDM. Further, while comparing the two schemes with a single carrier transmission scheme, it is observed that the effect of impulsive noise significantly reduces in FBMC and OFDM. Thus, it is concluded that FBMC is a better choice for the BB-PLC systems.