Bandwidth efficient power line communications based on OFDM

Power line communications for high data rates using orthogonal frequency di vision multiplexing are considered. We regard the situations where no chann el information is available at the transmitter and where channel informatio n is/is not provided to the receiver. In order to enable a performance eval uation of transmission schemes with different bandwidth efficiencies, a sto chastic representation of the channel transfer function is given, which lea ds to a fading channel model. As an appropriate measure of performance when applying powerful channel coding, the capacity of this special fading chan nel is calculated. The combination of a large signal constellation and low rate codes in order to obtain a fixed target rate proves to be advantageous both for coherent and bandwidth efficient noncoherent transmission over po wer line. The theoretic considerations are affirmed by means of simulations .