Reed solomon inner-convolutional outer concatenated code with error-erasure decoding for narrowband and broadband power line communications

Abstract

A novel concatenated coding system for both narrowband and broadband power line communications (NB-PLC and BB-PLC) is proposed. The order of the inner and the outer codes switches from the G3-PLC standard and the interleaver is eliminated. The Error-and-erasure decoder (EED) is selected as the Reed-Solomon inner code is because the impulsive noises clearly mark the erasure positions with a threshold-based algorithm. The nonbinary convolutional outer code with vector symbol decoding (VSD) can correct longer burst errors. The results show that for BB-PLC, the bit error rate (BER) of RS (63,51) error-only (ED) with VSD is 1.5×10-5 and of EED-VSD is 9.0×10-9 at Eb /No 26 dB. For NB-PLC, the BER of ED-VSD is 7.9×10-5 and of EED-VSD is 2.2×10-8 at Eb /No 16 dB. Therefore, BER of EED-VSD is three to four orders of magnitude lower than ED-VSD. Moreover, NB-PLC reaches the desired BER around 10-7 at about 10 dB lower Eb /No than BB-PLC.

Keywords

• broadband
• error and erasure decoding
• narrowband
• power line communications
• vector symbol decoding
• nonbinary code