Non-binary turbo-coded OFDM-PLC system in the presence of impulsive noise

The power-line communication (PLC) channel causes information-bearing signals to be affected by impulsive noise and the effects of the multipath fading. To mitigate these effects, we propose the employment of non-binary turbo codes, since non-binary error-correcting codes generally promise an enhanced performance in such harsh environments. In this paper, we investigate the performance of non-binary turbo-codes on PLC channels that exhibit frequency selectivity with additive Middleton Class A noise and compare with a comparable binary turbo-coded PLC system. In order to reduce the effect of multipath and impulsive noise, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) with non-linear receivers (blanking and clipping) have been employed. The system is examined on extremely impulsive channels where the value of the impulsive index (A) is 0.01 and the noise ratio (Γ) is 0.01. The results show that non-binary turbo codes are very robust and achieve a large gain over binary turbo codes on PLC channels.