A MIMO-OFDM Scheme over Coupled Multi-conductor Power-Line Communication Channel

In this paper, we propose a new MIMO transmission model for a type of typical coupled multi-conductor power cable existing in the power distribution networks. Based on this model, we did experiment with regard to the transfer functions and presented the measurement results. We used the experimental data to evaluate the coupling effects between inner conductors on the MIMO capacity. To understand the broadband PLC transmission performance on this model, we applied a MIMO-OFDM scheme while the channels are contaminated by Middleton´s class A impulsive noise (AWCN). Considering non-negligible coupling between inner conductors, we did a comparison between orthogonal space-time code and non-orthogonal space-time code. The results shown that this MIMO-OFDM scheme with the model we proposed could achieve much lower symbol error rate than SISO-OFDM and outperform previous reported MIMO-OFDM schemes over the coupled multi-conductor power cable.