Cyclostationary Noise Mitigation for SIMO Powerline Communications

The cyclostationary noise in low-voltage narrowband powerline communications (NB-PLC) severely degrades the communication reliability. In this paper, we adopt single-input multi-output (SIMO) transmission to enhance the reliability of NB-PLC. Considering the SIMO receiver structure, we exploit the NB-PLC noise cyclostationarity and the high spatial correlations across multiple receive phases to design practical and efficient noise mitigation techniques. In particular, we propose two time-domain frequency-shift (FRESH) filtering-based cyclostationary signal recovery techniques with different performance and complexity levels. The proposed time-domain-based FRESH filtering techniques minimize the mean-squared error in estimating the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) information signal in the time-domain. The FRESH filtering exploits the cyclic auto-correlation of both the NB-PLC noise and the OFDM information signal in addition to their cyclic cross-correlation across the receive phases. Moreover, we propose a frequency-domain-based cyclostationary noise mitigation technique that minimizes the mean-squared error in estimating the OFDM information signal in the frequency-domain. The proposed frequency-domain-based technique exploits the cyclostationarity of the noise to estimate its power spectral density as well as the cross-correlation, per frequency subchannel, over multiple stationary noise temporal regions. Our proposed SIMO NB-PLC noise mitigation techniques are shown via simulation results conducted using noise field measurements to achieve considerable performance gains over single-input single-output techniques. In addition, we show that our proposed techniques achieve considerable performance gains over the conventional SIMO maximal-ratio-combiner designed assuming stationary noise.