Bit Error Rate Analysis of Adaptive Modulation Techniques in Power Line Communication Channels

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to emulate through simulation example two simulation models developed in MATLAB to investigate how modulation schemes and error correction techniques affect Bit Error Rate (BER) performance under different noise scenarios. The first model examines Forward Error Correction (FEC) effect on the Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) / Power Line Communication (PLC) fading scenarios. An outcome indicates that FEC results are weakly enhanced, and BER stabilizes near 0.498 in various Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNR). But the colored noise filtering and multipath propagation, particularly in QPSK and 16-QAM showed marginal BER improvements. The second model discusses adaptive modulation in impulsive noise. The results indicate the following: although BER is normally decreased by increasing SNR, impulse noise may increase it up to approximately 0.5. When this happens, FEC allows higher order-modulations such as 64-QAM. Besides, BER decreased after the channel attenuation was reduced by a factor of 5 (from 1 to 0.2) to 0.462 not 0.423. Future research has concerned modeling time varying impulsive noise and quantifying PLC based impulsive noise sources in hybrid PLC-wireless networks and next-generation network structures.