Image transmission using unequal error protected multi-fold turbo codes over a two-user power-line binary adder channel

Impulsive noise is one of the major challenges for reliable transmission over power lines. Interleavers provide higher protection against the impulsive noise by dispersing information across the channel and spreading the burst of errors over multiple codewords. Multi-fold turbo (MFT) coding is a technique that improves the communication reliability using multiple interleavers. In the MFT codes, each data subsequence is equally protected. For applications in which data constitute information with various levels of importance, it is intuitive to offer the more important subsequence, a stronger protection. A modified form of the MFT codes capable of providing unequal error protection over a two-user power-line binary adder channel is proposed here. As a benchmark, two test images are transmitted across the channel. The trellis-based iterative algorithm is modified for the two-user scenario to decode the received signal. The simulation results show a gain of 1.5 dB for the modified MFT code over the conventional turbo codes for each of the transmitted images. A gain of 2 dB is also recorded for the most protected component of each image over the least protected components.