Performance evaluation of DWT-OFDM in multipath PLC channel under impulsive and narrowband noise

Reliable and high speed communication over power lines requires a robust modulation scheme, like a Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) based modulation technique, hence the quality of data communication over the noisy in-home power line network can be improved. This paper investigates the performance of conventional Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Discrete Wavelet Transform-based OFDM (DWT-OFDM) systems in the presence of background and impulsive noise in multipath power lines as a communication channels. The time and frequency localization properties of the wavelet transform mitigates narrowband and heavy impulsive noise in the power lines which results in performance improvement. Simulation results in terms of PAPR, PSD, and Bit Error Rate (BER) show that DWT-OFDM is more robust against interference and multipath effects compared to DFT-OFDM, and increasing the length of the basis function improves BER and PAPR.