Power line carrier (PLC) communication provides a ready medium for broadband internet connectivity and as well as monitoring, control and automation functions for both industries and homes. In fact, the power line network is the most expansive network in the world reaching every room in every facility connected to the power grid. Thus, PLC technology is the most economical way to provide internet connectivity and home networking in rural/remote areas. However, the original design of power lines was not for communication purposes but electrical power transmission. Thus, PLC technology provides a readily available channel that is hostile when used for communication purposes. This hostility is due to the many problematic characteristics of the power line network from a communications perspective. They include reflections due to impedance mismatch, frequency varying attenuation, multipath due to the cable joints, as well as the different types of noise inherent in the channel. In this paper, we investigate the impact of impulse noise on the performance of an OFDM based BPSK PLC channel. This is motivated by the fact that the very characteristics of the impulse noise, namely; pulse width, amplitude and interarrival time, have not been studied at an elementary level in terms of their influence on the performance of the PLC channel. The mathematics behind the impulse function is utilized in an attempt to fully characterize the impulse noise for the PLC channel. The performance of the PLC system is compared in terms of the bit error rate (BER) characteristics for given signal to noise ratio (SNR) values for different impulsive noise parameters.
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