Performance analysis of home power network for broadband communications

• Main Author: Lam, Pak Lun
• Other Authors: Chen Shiun
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Wireless communication systems
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/15710
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Power line communications have been an ongoing development in the past 10 years with a growing number of applications being developed. Previous studies and research have been focusing on using the OFDM modulation scheme for data transmission in power line communications. A new modulation method known as Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) pre-coding is introduced and investigated to determine if it is feasible to be used as an alternative to the OFDM modulation scheme in power line communications. The SVD pre-coding scheme makes use of the pre/post-RAKE structure and the bit loading algorithm to increase the bit-rate for data transmission. In this project, MatLab codes were written to run simulations for SVD pre-coding. The channel impulse response for the ring and tree topologies was determined using previous students’ findings. Simulations were done for both the ring and tree topologies and comparisons were made. The simulated results and comparisons shows that SVD pre-coding has a similar BER performance as that of the OFDM system while the performance for data transmission in the ring topology appear to be more superior to that of the tree topology. Other factors apart from BER performances also have to be considered in deciding which network topology or which modulation scheme is better for power line communications. In conclusion, SVD-precoding with bit loading could really be a possible alternative to the OFDM system since they have comparable performances.