The University of British Columbia

Data transmission over power lines is an attractive alternative to well-established wireline and wireless communication technologies. One of the main challenges in accomplishing reliable power-line communication (PLC) is channel impairment through electromagnetic interferences, or so-called impulse noise. In this paper, we consider transmission over impulse-noise channels for a typical narrowband system architecture employing convolutional codes and Viterbi decoding. We present different decoding metrics, including new designs adopted from the multiuser detection literature, and we derive expressions for cutoff rate and bit-error rate (BER) performances of the corresponding decoders. These expressions are amenable for quick numerical evaluation and thus, constitute a valuable tool for decoder optimization and performance comparison. Our numerical and BER simulation results show that one of the proposed metrics enables robust decoding without knowledge of the statistic of the impulse noise with a performance close to that of optimum decoding, which relies on the noise statistic. It is further highlighted that, different from transmission over the Gaussian-noise channel, quadrature detection is beneficial in case of real-valued modulation and passband transmission over impulse-noise channels.