Design Of An In-Home Multicarrier Broadband Power Line Communication System For Tanzania Homes

ABSTRACT

Indoor broadband power-line communication (BPLC) networks with different

number of branches, different terminal load impedance, different line length and

impulsive noise using OFDM were considered. Earlier investigations have shown

that the power-line channel suffers from multipath effects along with impulsive

noise. In this dissertation the OFDM system was designed based on Anatory et al

model using the impulse responses of typical Tanzania indoor power-line networks.

It was observed that the maximum delay spread for such networks is 2μs, making the

number of sub-channels for OFDM to be 512 with a cyclic prefix of 64 at a

bandwidth of 16.5MHz.

Bit error rate (BER) performance of the OFDM system under multipath effects was

analysed based on the simulations of the four Tanzania indoor power-line networks

at different load impedances with number of branches and branch length dictated by

a particular home power-line network. It was observed that the performance of the

OFDM system is affected by number of branches and load impedances. To maintain

the bit error performance an average SNR per bit gain of 28dB is needed so that

sustained communication is still available in all the four Tanzania indoor power-line

networks. The OFDM system performance at the fixed load impedance within the

same house was different indicating that the number of branches has the influence on

the performance.

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