Abstract:

A new power line communication (Power line communication, PLC) scheme named full carrier index differential chaos shift keying (Differential chaos shift keying, DCSK) with noise reduction (FCI-DCSK-NR) is proposed in the paper, which integrates both noise reduction technology and index modulation with DCSK to tackle the problem caused by complex power line channel, especially the impulsive noise. In the proposed scheme, all the carriers except the reference carrier are firstly divided into two major categories, i.e., the first active carriers and the second active carriers, where the first active carriers are chosen by the index bits and the remained carriers are the second active carriers. Then, the transmitted bits are delivered through the chaotic signal and its Hilbert transform successively by the first active carriers and the second active carriers. Besides, the scheme achieves noise reduction by transmitting the signal many times at the transmitter and averaging the received signals at the receiver. The bit error rate (Bit error rate, BER) expression of FCI-DCSK-NR over power line channel is derived, and its correctness is validated through Monte Carlo simulations. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can deal with the impulsive noise of power line channel effectively. It is shown that the proposed scheme can enhance the BER performance and data rate compared to traditional DCSK and generalized carrier index DCSK (Generalized carrier index DCSK, GCI-DCSK).

Key words: IM, bit error rate, background noise, differential chaos shift keying, powerline channel, impulsive noise