A MC-CDMA iterative solution for Broadband over powerline communications

Power Line Communication (PLC) is foreseen as a potential solution for increasing the throughput of future wireline communication systems. Indeed, the existing infrastructure allows the development of Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) to provide a competing high-speed Internet `to-the-home´ alternative. The frequency selectivity and the impulsive noise of the PLC channel call for advanced signal processing techniques. Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MCCDMA) is a promising transmission procedure to mitigate these unfavorable properties, along with a linear iterative receiver to remove Multiple Access Interference (MAI) and Inter Symbol Interference (ISI). This paper focuses on the full description of a MC-CDMA transceiver on a block by block basis over realistic PLC channel models and adequate simulation parameters including spreading, interleaving, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM)modulation, linear Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) equalizer, Soft Output Viterbi Algorithm (SOVA) and iterative decoding.