An optimized time-frequency interleaving scheme for OFDM-based power line communication systems

In this paper, an optimized time-frequency interleaving scheme is proposed to combat against the narrowband interference (NBI) and time-domain impulsive noise (TIN) for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems in power line communications (PLC). To improve both the anti-NBI and anti-TIN performance, we propose two criteria based on which the optimized interleaving scheme is designed: (i) to increase the number of different OFDM blocks for one forward error correction (FEC) codeword, which is aimed at TIN mitigation; and (ii) to increase the number of different sub-carriers mapped to the data cells in one FEC codeword, which is aimed at NBI mitigation. Simulations show that the proposed interleaving scheme can effectively reduce the impairments caused by NBI and/or TIN in OFDM systems under PLC environments, and hence achieve better performance than the conventional block interleaving scheme.