A novel nonbinary concatenated coding system for Narrowband Power Line communications

This paper proposes a novel nonbinary concatenated coding system with nonbinary Reed-Solomon (RS) inner codes and a nonbinary convolutional outer code for Narrowband Power Line Channel (NB-PLC). This channel is modeled with a “Middleton A” impulsive noise and an AWGN noise. With this structure, the inner decoder will correct random and short burst errors while the outer decoder will correct much longer burst errors. Results show that using RS(63,47) code by itself leads to floor of the decoding failure probability in the range of 10^-2, which is too high for practical communications. With an additional (3,2,2) convolutional outer code and Vector Symbol Outer Decoder, the probability is significantly decreased by approximately four orders of magnitude from 1.25 × 10^-2 to 1.43 × 10^-6 at the impulsive index A = 0.1 and SNR of 8 dB.