On the Use of Alpha-Stable Distributions in Noise Modeling for PLC

Power-line communication (PLC) deals with the challenge of transmitting data over a channel impaired by background and impulsive noises. In this paper, we provide evidence that the marginal distribution of the noise found in PLC systems exhibits some statistical properties that can be well captured by using α-stable distribution. Motivated by this result, we present a practical application of the α-stable model to synthesize noise in the power line. Furthermore, we also show that this family of distributions is a suitable alternative in order to model the PLC background noise that is commonly assumed as Gaussian. Finally, we study the performance of an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing communication system under both kinds of background noise (i.e., Gaussian and α-stable). From these experiments, we conclude that if highly impulsive background traffic is mistakenly assumed as Gaussian in evaluation studies, the system performance is largely overestimated.