Usana Tuntoolavest, Narathep Sakunnithimetha and Kraiwee Limchaikit

DOI: 10.14456/sjst-psu.2017.74

pp. 601 - 608

Abstract

A novel concatenated coding system for both narrowband and broadband power line communications (NB-PLC and
BB-PLC) is proposed. The order of the inner and the outer codes switches from the G3-PLC standard and the interleaver is
eliminated. The Error-and-erasure decoder (EED) is selected as the Reed-Solomon inner code is because the impulsive noises
clearly mark the erasure positions with a threshold-based algorithm. The nonbinary convolutional outer code with vector
symbol decoding (VSD) can correct longer burst errors. The results show that for BB-PLC, the bit error rate (BER) of RS (63,51)
error-only (ED) with VSD is 1.5×10^-5 and of EED-VSD is 9.0×10^-9 at E_b
/N_o
 26 dB. For NB-PLC, the BER of ED-VSD is 7.9×10^-5 and
of EED-VSD is 2.2×10^-8 at E_b
/N_o
 16 dB. Therefore, BER of EED-VSD is three to four orders of magnitude lower than ED-VSD.
Moreover, NB-PLC reaches the desired BER around 10^-7 at about 10 dB lower E_b
/N_o
 than BB-PLC.

Keywords

• broadband
• error and erasure decoding
• narrowband
• power line communications
• vector symbol decoding
• nonbinary code