Simulation Of OFDM-Based Power-Line Communication System And Its Performance Analysis

PLC (Power Line Communication) is a data/voice transmission method by making use of the power line as the communication media. Compared with other wired communications, Since PLC has the advantages of low-cost and easy to setup etc, it has huge potential applications. With the increasing demand of the network speed, it is very important to make full use of the PLC channel capacity. The thesis mainly discusses this issue and puts forward an improved scheme.First of all, this thesis analyzes in great details the characteristics of the power line channel. Then, the noise scenarios of the power line and its classification are discussed, together with the simulation analysis to the major noise models. Based on the comparatively analysis of various power line channel models, the model by M. Zimmermann and K. Dostert, a top-down approach, is chosen and validated via computer simulation.By using MATLAB 6.5 as our simulation tools, a power line communication platform based on OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) is set up, and the extensive simulations have been carried out based on the platform. Our analysis and simulation results show that, OFDM technology can perfectly work with the power line channel and effectively defend the impacts from noise characteristics, attenuation characteristics, time-varying characteristics. In addition, different modulation schemes (such as, BPSK, QPSK and QAM etc.) of the sub-carriers of OFDM also have some significant influence on the system BER performance, where the BPSK has relatively better BER performance. Through simulation and analysis, we know that adding channel code can improve the whole performance of PLC system.Finally, the thesis concludes by summarizing the main contributions of the research and by presenting some ideas and prospects for future researches.