Improved HomePlug AV channel estimation exploiting sounding procedure

In this paper we investigate channel estimation in the context of the OFDM-based HomePlug AV system using the OPERA power-line channel models. In particular, the proposed channel estimation exploits the sounding procedure available in HomePlug AV, by averaging the estimates of the channel collected during several received frames. To allow the channel estimation to properly work also in the case of a non ideal frame synchronization, a method to estimate the frame synchronization offset between successive frames is presented. Numerical results, in terms of BER versus signal-to-noise ratio, show that the performance of the proposed channel estimation almost overlaps the performance achieved with perfect channel knowledge.