Bandwidth-Efficient Forward-Error-Correction-Coding for High Speed Powerline Communications

This paper applies erasure correction codes to powerline communications and compares them to turbo product codes (TPC). The TPC offers near Shannon limit performance for the Gaussian channel. However, assuming a channel with burst noise, then the TPC must be able to detect burst noise boundaries to assign lower reliability to burst errors. If symbol-by-symbol reliability is available, then an erasure correction code, such as information dispersal algorithm (IDA), may perform as well as TPC in terms of block error rate for large blocks, while the TPC will always have a lower bit error rate. An approximation for the performance of IDA is also given