Design and Analysis of Replica Piecewise M-Ary DCSK Scheme for Power Line Communications With Asynchronous Impulsive Noise

Previous studies have shown that impulsive noise can weaken the performance of power line communication (PLC). Though DCSK can improve the performance in an order of magnitude comparing to the direct sequence differential phase shift keying (DS-DPSK), it is still a challenge to further improve the BER performance with signal redesign without the need of advanced and expensive extra noise suppression technologies. The paper introduces the model of asynchronous impulsive noise of Middleton class-A noise and corresponding multipath fading channels in PLC, and analyzes the bit error rate (BER) performance of the M-ary differential chaos shift keying (MDCSK) scheme over different channels. Furthermore, a new replica piecewise frame of MDCSK (RP-MDCSK) is proposed to resist the impulse noise. In the proposed scheme, one piecewise of signals is transmitted first. Then, it replicates pw times, which serves as the reference signal transmitted in the first half symbol period. The information-bearing signal combines the reference signal with its Hilbert transform in the second half. At the receiver, one piece of reference signals is extracted and then correlated with its corresponding information-bearing part. The BER expressions of the MDCSK and the proposed scheme are derived and analyzed over different channels, and verified by simulations. Comparing with the corresponding schemes, it is found that the BER of the proposed scheme is by 2-3 orders of magnitude lower.