Design and Analysis of OFDM System for Powerline Based Communication

Abstract

Research on digital communication systems has been greatly developed in the past few years and offers a high quality of transmission in both wired and wireless communication environments. Coupled with advances in new modulation techniques, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a well-known digital multicarrier communication technique and one of the best methods of digital data transmission over a limited bandwidth.
The main aim of this research is to design an OFDM modem for powerline-based communication in order to propose and examine a novel approach in comparing the different modulation order, different modulation type, application of Forward Error Correction (FEC) scheme and also application of different noise types and applying them to the two modelled channels, Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and Powerline modelled channel. This is an attempt to understand and recognise the most suitable technique for the transmission of message or image within a communication system. In doing so, MATLAB and embedded Digital Signal Processing (DSP) systems are used to simulate the operation of virtual transmitter and receiver.
The simulation results presented in this project suggest that lower order modulation formats (Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) and 4-Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM)), are the most preferred modulation techniques (in both type and order) for their considerable performance. The results also indicated that, Convolutional Channel Encoding (CCE)-Soft and Block Channel Encoding (BCE)-Soft are by far the best encoding techniques (in FEC type) for their best performance in error detection and correction. Indeed, applying these techniques to the two modelled channels has proven very successful and will be accounted as a novel approach for the transmission of message or image within a powerline based communication system.