Redundancy reduced transceivers and channel identification under impulsive noise

Power line communication channels have been recognized as having large delay spreads and being subject to restrictive noise patterns. These characteristics hamper the transceiver design in general. In particular, the usual scheme based on OFDM requires the use of large amount of redundancy in order to mitigate the effect of a long time impulse response of the channel. In this paper, we present a block-based transceiver structure that has a better spectral efficiency than OFDM. This is obtained by allowing inter-block interference and by controlling it with judicious design of the transmitter and the receiver. In particular, using the newly presented scheme for transmission on PLC channels, we have obtained information rates that are 35% faster than those obtained with OFDM under the same configuration. Since this new scheme requires channel knowledge at the receiver, to perform the task, we introduce a novel identification algorithm that is particularly robust to impulsive noise. We show that this identification is not only robust but it also has fast convergence.