Distortion Evaluation of DMT Signals on Indoor Broadband Power-Line Channels

Indoor power-line channels are frequency and time selective. At this moment, the distortion suffered by DMT signals when traversing these channels must be accomplished by means of computationally intensive simulations, since no consensus on a statistical channel model has been reached yet. This paper proposes a simpler method to compute this distortion. In the absence of long-term changes, indoor power-line channels response can be modeled as a Linear Periodically Time-Varying (LPTV) filter. When a DMT signal traverses such kind of channel, it experiences a twofold distortion: Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI) and Inter-Carrier Interference (ICI) caused by the frequency selectivity and ICI due to the time variation.