On the Capacity of MIMO Broadband Power Line Communications Channels

Communications over power lines in the frequency range above 2 MHz, commonly referred to as broadband (BB) power line communications (PLC), has been the focus of increasing research attention and standardization efforts in recent years. BB-PLC channels are characterized by a dominant colored non-Gaussian additive noise, as well as by periodic variations of the channel impulse response and of the noise statistics. In this paper, we study the fundamental rate limits for BB-PLC channels by bounding their capacity while accounting for the unique properties of these channels. We obtain explicit expressions for the derived bounds for several BB-PLC noise models, and illustrate the resulting fundamental limits in a numerical analysis.