Estimation of PLC channels: An adaptive simplified map approach

Abstract

An adaptive channel estimation method, to be used in Power Line Communication systems with Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing modulation, is presented in this paper. The proposed Maximum A-Posteriori based estimator assumes that the channel is frequency selective and slowly time varying and estimates the subchannel correlations adaptively. The performance of the estimator is investigated by evaluating the Mean Square Error of estimations. The simulations are done using measured channel data with additive white Gaussian noise assumption, which show that the proposed estimator has better performance compared to Maximum Likelihood estimation. The performance of the proposed estimator is also analysed under the assumption of colored noise, which is the common case in power lines. The simulations have declared that the performance of the proposed estimator is quite satisfactory, even when the noise is coloured.