Performance of OFDM in the Variation of the Path Quantity in Power Line Communications

Power line communication is an attractive alternative to traditional networks due to its ability to offer broadband internet access, telephone service, cable television and home automation. These are collectively known as in-home services using the existing power delivery network. However, the problems affecting power line communication transmission (e.g. multipath noise, interference, frequency selective fading due to multipath, attenuation delays, presence of echoes, impulsive and coloured noise) create the needs to employ a suitable modulation scheme such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) to counter its adverse effects on signal transmission. This paper analyzes the effects of variation of the path quantity in the multipath in terms of bit error rate (BER). From the results, it is shown that in terms of bit error rate (BER), we notice that at < 8dB, the single carrier modulation may produce less error than OFDM by a small margin as the quantity of paths exceed the 4 path model. After > 8dB, OFDM shows a better performance with reduced BER while the single carrier modulation counterpart exhibits a slow improvement in BER.