Matrix codes and multitone frequency shift keying for power line communications

Single-tone frequency shift keying (FSK) modulation with permutation codes has been found to be useful in addressing the problem of narrowband noise disturbance in power line communications. However, this modulation scheme is restrictive since the number of frequencies used must be at least as large as the number of symbols in the permutation code. In this paper, we propose the use of multitone FSK and binary matrix codes to overcome this restriction. We construct infinite families of efficiently decodable matrix codes with rates and relative distances bounded away from zero, that uses only a logarithmic number of frequencies in the length of the code. Simulation results show that our multitone modulation scheme outperform single-tone modulation schemes.