| Motivated by applications in home networking and the convenience of a pre-installed infrastructure, the aim of this work is to study the feasibility of multi mega-bit per second data transmission over in-building power lines.;Power line channels are modelled in this work as linear time-invariant systems with additive noise. Based on restrictions placed on possible wiring configurations by the U.S. national electric code, as well as the physical structure and size of buildings, a channel simulator was developed. The simulator generates a random wiring structure and computes the channel transfer function and capacity between two randomly chosen wall-outlets. This process was repeated many times and a channel capacity distribution was found. This modelling approach suggests that with a transmit power of 1 mW, data transmission in the range of 24 Mbps and 67 Mbps should be feasible in 99% and 80% of all channels respectively.;Regulatory constraints place limitations on the radiated electric field strength from communication signals imposed on power lines. A relatively simple method for computing radiated electric field has been introduced. The new capacity distribution, limited by FCC regulations, shows that 90% of channels have a capacity greater than 94 Mbps.;A comparison between three modulation techniques namely single-carrier, multi-carrier and spread spectrum was made. It was verified that multi-carrier modulation is more suitable for power line communications. Specific values for different parameters of a multi-carrier modulation, such as the number of sub-channels and the length of cyclic-prefix, were proposed. Also a simplified approximate FFT/IFFT which is suitable to use in multi-carrier modulation was proposed. The proposed FFT/IFFT reduces the required area for adders and multipliers by a percentage between 20% to 72%.;An error control coding technique suitable for power line, as well as other band limited high SNR channels, was developed. The developed technique combines the excellent error correction capability of low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, and good performance of multilevel codes in high SNR channels. The simulation results for power line channels showed that the system can operate within a 1 dB SNR gap from the channel capacity. |
