Physical-layer goodput maximization for Power Line Communications

In this paper, we present a new solution to the well-known integer bit loading problem for Power Line Communication systems, that is able to jointly consider transmission rate and bit error rate (BER) as performance parameters. This goal is achieved by means of a Trellis Coded Modulation (TCM), by taking advantage of its appealing property to combine modulation and coding, so as to state the power allocation problem as an optimization in which both BER and rate are tied to the TCM optimal design. The need to compare such a scheme with others known in the Literature in terms of performances, led us to give a brief insight into the two standard approaches: Maximum Rate (MR) and Minimum BER (MB), which consider as objective functions only rate or BER, respectively. Numerical results are presented to stress how our solution improve system performances, both in ideal condition and with additional impairments such as crosstalk and impulsive noise.