A study on the performance of turbo coding for noise environments in power lines

Power line communication (PLC) is very attractive for achieving high-rate in-home networks. In order to achieve reliable communication using power lines, effective measures including error control techniques need to be taken against this particular noise. This paper focuses its attention on an effect of turbo codes on PLC. We adopt two noise environments for examining the effect in terms of BER performance. The result of the examination provides that turbo codes have enough capability to limit the effect of the noise. It also provides that the effect depends on the relation between the interleaver size and the period of the AC source. Since an effective SNR estimation scheme should be required to apply turbo codes to PLC, we also examine the effect of the pilot aided SNR estimation scheme in terms of BER performance.