SINR Analysis of Windowed OFDM in Power Line Communication Systems

Abstract

The use of an accurate cyclic prefix length is crucial in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) to avoid intercarrier and intersymbol interference. Although there have been many works that analyse the interference of windowed OFDM, this study remains open in the context of power line communications (PLCs) taking into account the physical-layer (PHY) specifications of the standards. This paper focuses on obtaining a closed-form expression of the input-output relationship in windowed OFDM power line communication (PLC) systems under the condition of insufficient cyclic prefix, while incorporating various blocks deployed in the PHY under IEEE 1901 standards. The derived analysis is important for quantifying the undesired signal component in each subcarrier at a specific time, which renders the detection of the corresponding symbol more difficult. Moreover, a novel procedure is proposed that allows the use of a smaller number of redundant samples to avoid interference. This novel procedure, performed in the receiver after the windowing stage, replaces the overlap-and-add operations with multiplications, offering the advantage of requiring fewer samples from the time-domain received signal to recover each transmitted data symbol. Numerical results demonstrate the feasibility of interference-free transmission on channels with a larger number of samples, thereby yielding better results across various PLC scenarios.

Keywords

• Power line communications (PLC)
• orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)
• windowing
• cyclic prefix (CP)
• bit error rate (BER)
• achievable data rate