Advanced Signal Processing for PLCs: Wavelet-OFDM

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Panasonic, 550 S. Winchester Blvd., San Jose, 95128 CA, USA Panasonic Communications Co., 4-1-62 Minoshima Hakata-Ku, Fukuoka 812-8531, Japan

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S. Galli(*), H. Koga(**), N. Kodama(**)

Abstract There are today broadband power line modems available in retail stores that are based on either conventional OFDM or on Wavelet-OFDM. However, the comparison of these two multicarrier modulation techniques in the specific context of power line communications has been seldom addressed in the literature. In this paper, OFDM and Wavelet OFDM are compared by focusing on two important aspects: transmission efficiency and spectral leakage. It will be shown that, for the case of the power line channel, Wavelet OFDM offers substantial advantages over conventional or windowed OFDM.

I. INTRODUCTION

ULTICARRIER Modulations (MCM) are receiving increasing attention for their capability to cope with channels characterized by severe inter-symbol interference (ISI) without the use of complex equalizers [1]. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is the most common MCM and uses a Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). Despite its simplicity and popularity, OFDM has several disadvantages which are particularly important in the context of power line communications (PLCs): OFDM requires an adequate Guard Interval (GI) to eliminate ISI. OFDM is characterized by poor spectral properties that cause a high degree of spectral leakage. OFDM has poor narrowband interference (NBI) rejection capabilities. OFDM has poor resiliency to impulsive noise. Although the drawbacks above can be considered a disadvantage on any communications medium, these drawbacks become very significant for the PLC case. First of all, the power line channel is a very harsh medium that significantly hinders high data rate communications [2], [3]. Therefore, the transmission inefficiency caused by the introduction of the GI further reduces an already low data rate. Secondly, since power line cables are typically unshielded, PLCs may cause interference to existing wireless services in the High Frequency (HF) band as well as be the victim of radio frequency ingress (RFI). Reducing electromagnetic leakage is very important, so that the ability to decrease the transmitted Power Spectrum Density (PSD) in certain frequency bands becomes an attractive feature. Unfortunately, the PSD of an OFDM signal is characterized by high sidelobes and this causes

not only poor adjacent band rejection capability, but also poor resiliency to NBI. For these reasons, windowing techniques are often used to alleviate this problem [4]. Third, the power line channel is characterized by both colored noise and strong impulsive noise [5]. Although it is known that the performance of OFDM is better than single carrier systems in the presence of impulse noise when the probability of an impulse is not too high and the impulse power is moderate [6], the power line situation is very different as impulsive noise is characterized by a rather high probability of occurrence and a rather high power. Moreover, in the case of impulsive noise characterized by a non-flat PSD, the performance degradation of OFDM also depends on its spectral properties. As mentioned above, due to the use of a DFT-based transform, OFDM is characterized by a high spectral leakage so that the resiliency of OFDM to colored impulsive noise is poor. The effect of impulsive noise on MCMs is a very interesting topic since, for some time, there has been a common believe that W-OFDM may be more sensitive to impulsive noise than OFDM because of the symbol overlap that characterizes W-OFDM. In fact, a single strong impulse may wipe out g>1 consecutive W-OFDM symbols thus causing more errors at the receiver than in the OFDM case where only a single symbol would be affected. This believe stemmed from the ADSL environment, a situation where W-OFDM symbols had to be very long in order to overcome the severe ISI created by links that could be several kilofeet long. However, the power line case is very different from the ADSL case because delay spreads are much smaller. This implies that, for PLCs, W-OFDM symbols can be much shorter and, therefore, offer much better robustness to impulse noise than in the ADSL environment. For example, current products based on W-OFDM with overlap factor g=4, use 512 real carriers with symbol lengths of 8,192 s. Alternative products based on windowed OFDM use around 1024 complex carriers with a symbol length of around 40 s. A strong impulse noise would wipe out up to four W-OFDM symbols or a single OFDM symbol, nevertheless the same amount of bits would be lost. These serious drawbacks make OFDM a less than ideal technique for high data rate communications over power line channels. Therefore, alternative MCMs should be considered for PLCs and compared to OFDM. In the literature, substantial work can be found on MCM systems where the DFT-transform is substituted by a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) [7]-[13]. Moreover, there is considerable interest today into the use of

978-1-4244-1976-0/08/$25.00 2008 IEEE.

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wavelets in PLCs as the many publications on this topic suggest (see [17]-[20], and references therein). The purpose of this paper is to compare OFDM and W-OFDM in the context of PLCs. In particular, this paper will focus on the two important issues of transmission efficiency and spectral leakage, whereas the robustness of OFDM and W-OFDM to impulsive noise will be addressed elsewhere. Besides the interest for theoretical issues, the comparison of W-OFDM and OFDM in the context of PLCs is also of practical interest as there are broadband PLC modems today available in retail stores that are based on these two MCM techniques: Panasonic manufactures the HD-PLC modem [14], which is based on W-OFDM with M=512 carriers, whereas the HomePlug A/V modem as well as the modem produced by DS2 are based on windowed OFDM with over a thousand carriers. As opposed to previous work on this topic [15], we will show that W-OFDM allows substantial performance gains with respect to OFDM in the context of PLCs. II. OVERVIEW OF W-OFDM Wavelet transforms consist of an M-band transmultiplexers, which use filters of greater length than the rectangular windows used in DFT-based OFDM systems. The use of symbols of longer duration allows obtaining lower sidelobe levels with respect to conventional or windowed OFDM. Better stopband attenuation results in both lower levels of inter-channel interference (ICI) and greater robustness to NBI. In particular, critically decimated Perfect Reconstruction Cosine Modulated Filter Banks (PR-CMFB) with transmultiplexer are often used because they can be implemented in a computationally efficient manner (polyphase representation) using a fast discrete cosine transform (DCT) algorithm; moreover, the design is simpler than general filterbanks because all the filters are derived from a single prototype filter. A comparative analysis on the performance of OFDM and PR-CMFB is reported in [8]-[11]. A. Wavelet-OFDM Using Transmultiplexer A general W-OFDM system that uses an M-band transmultiplexer is shown in Figure 1. A transmultiplexer consists of a synthesis filter bank and analysis filter bank.

Fm ( z ) =

N 1 k =0

k f m (k ) z , 0 m < M

(1)

An analysis bank is expressed as follows:

H m ( z ) = hm (k ) z k , 0 m < M
k =0 N 1

(2)

In the equations above, M indicates the number of subchannels and N represents the length of each filter. In general, N M < M ' ; if M = M, then we have a maximally decimated M-channel transmultiplexer. W-OFDM may be implemented with Perfect Reconstruction Filter Banks (PRFBs). Perfect Reconstruction means that the output is equal to the input a part from a gain and a delay, and the relationship between analysis filterbank and synthesis filterbank is as follows:
f m (k ) = hm ( N 1 k ), k = 0,1,..., N 1 (3) The above equation is expressed in the Z- domain as follows: (z ) F ( z ) = z ( N 1) H (4)
m m

( z ) is the conjugate of H ( z ) , In above the equation, H m m and z is replaced by z-1.

B. W-OFDM using Perfect Reconstruction Cosine Modulated Filter Bank (PR-CMFB) and Extended Lapped Transform (ELT) In CMFB, the length of all filters of synthesis filters Fm ( z ) and analysis filters H m ( z ) is gM, where g indicates the overlapping factor. Symbol waveforms used in OFDM do not overlap in time, and this is a consequence of the use of rectangular windowing. On the other hand, symbol waveforms used in W-OFDM overlap in time as shown in Figure 2. The amount of overlap (number of overlapping consecutive symbols) is determined by the parameter g.

Figure 2 - Example of W-OFDM waveforms for the case of g=4. The bit sequence 1,1,-1,1,-1 is transmitted. A single bit spans a time equal to gTS.

Figure 1 - W-OFDM system using a transmultiplexer.

All filters are obtained from a cosine modulated prototype filter P0(z) as follows:
P0 ( z ) =
2 M 1
k =0 k p0 (k ) z

A synthesis bank is expressed as follows:

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And each of filters is

1 N 1 f m (k ) = 2 p0 (k ) cos (m + )( k ) (1) m (6.a) 2 M 2 4 1 N 1 hm (k ) = 2 p0 (k ) cos (m + )(k ) + (1) m (6.b) 2 2 4 M

The prototype filter P0(z) is expressed as follows:

P0 ( z ) =
2 M 1
k =0 k 2M z Gk ( z )

modulations, i.e. 2D constellations such as QAM. However, the frequency resolution of W-OFDM is twice the one of OFDM because a non rectangular windowing allows for a higher degree of spectral overlap. As a consequence, for the same total bandwidth and the same number of transform points M, W-OFDM uses M real carriers whereas OFDM uses M/2 complex carriers. As a consequence, OFDM and W-OFDM have the same spectral efficiency [7].

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An efficient implementation is available, where P0(z) can be calculated with low rate and can be represented by a non-recursive cascaded lattice filter as shown in Figure 3. Moreover, CMFB can be implemented using DCT-IV and the prototype filter can be based on a lattice filter structure, thus CMFB can be calculated with low computational effort. Figure 4 shows the block diagram of the fast CMFB [12], [13].

Figure 5 Example of prototype filter (M=512, g=4) Figure 3 - W-OFDM system using a transmultiplexer.

C. W-OFDM Waveforms and Guard Interval (GI) A typical technique used in OFDM to compensate for ISI is to employ a GI which allows simple 1-tap equalization at the receiver at the cost of a loss in transmission efficiency. Since symbol duration in W-OFDM extends over g consecutive symbols, a GI is not used. Although this means that ISI is not eliminated (or compensated), the lack of a GI makes W-OFDM systems more efficient than OFDM since no overhead is used. Moreover, W-OFDM has better resiliency to ISI than OFDM so that its performance is better than that of OFDM for the same amount of ISI [7]-[9]. III. ISI COMPENSATION IN MCM SYSTEMS W-OFDM and OFDM exhibit the same performance (BER vs. energy per bit to noise power density ratio - Eb/N0) over AWGN [7]. However, if we consider frequency selective channels, then OFDM and W-OFDM behave differently with respect to ISI. The propagation of signals over power line cables is characterized by several kinds of impairments [2]. In particular, these channels exhibit strong ISI due to multipath propagation which arises when the transmitted signal arrives at the receiver following multiple propagation paths. As shown in [3], also grounding practices may give rise to additional propagation paths. The presence of multipath leads to frequency selective fading and ISI at the receiver.

The optimization of the prototype filter is made considering the trade-off between the stopband attenuation and transition width of the CMFB frequency responses. Better stopband behavior can be obtained with large value of g, but computational complexity increases considerably. A good compromise between stopband attenuation and computational complexity is to choose g=4, i.e. four consecutive symbols overlap with each other. If g=4, we obtain the prototype filter shown in.

Figure 4 - Fast CMFB: (a) inverse; (b) direct.

W-OFDM employing PR-CMFB can use only real modulations, i.e. 1D constellations such as PAM. On the other hand, conventional (or windowed) OFDM uses complex

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A. ISI and OFDM Systems If a GI is used and its duration is longer than the duration of the channel impulse response Tm (or L in number of samples), then ISI is completely eliminated and full equalization is achieved. The price to pay for this simple technique is that the GI reduces transmission efficiency and this reduction - which is proportional to the duration of the multipath Tm - can range between 20-40% depending on the channel. As an alternative, it is possible to reduce the loss in transmission efficiency by setting the GI to be equal to 2-3 times the root mean square (rms) delay spread of the channel, which is defined as the square root of the second central moment of the power-delay profile. This design choice does not totally eliminate ISI, so this solution reduces the transmission efficiency loss but causes some performance degradation. Increasing the number of carriers for the same bandwidth, i.e. reducing carrier spacing, has the effect of increasing transmission efficiency since the ratio between the duration of the GI and the baud period TS becomes smaller. In this approach, the transmission efficiency loss is compensated by increased complexity, in fact circuit size (especially memory size) grows as symbol length increases. On the basis of the above considerations, in practical OFDM systems there is always a trade off between residual ISI, system complexity and transmission efficiency. Moreover, whatever approach is followed, typical transmission efficiencies in OFDM are around 80% or lower. B. ISI and W-OFDM Systems Since W-OFDM does not employ a GI for channel equalization, its resiliency to ISI is directly proportional to the W-OFDM symbol duration. Resiliency is then proportional to the reciprocal of the carrier spacing and to the degree of overlap introduced by the filter banks. On the other hand, the resiliency of OFDM systems to uncompensated ISI is only dependent on the reciprocal of the carrier spacing as there is no symbol overlap. Since increasing g causes larger computational complexity, what is usually done in practice is to increase the number of carriers. Therefore, as opposed to OFDM, in W-OFDM systems it is possible to obtain better robustness to ISI by increasing the number of carriers. A fundamental design choice in W-OFDM is the symbol duration, as this controls the amount of ISI that can be tolerated. As is well known, an equalizer is not necessary if the rms delay spread of the channel is less than 15% of the symbol duration. On the basis of an extensive measurement campaign, we have ascertained that 99% of indoor power line channels exhibit an rms delay spread that is below 1.5 s. This explains why existing commercial PLC modems that use W-OFDM have a symbol duration of 8,192 s and M=512 [14]. C. Simulation Results of ISI Channels We have considered a two-ray channel for our simulations to show the resiliency of OFDM and W-OFDM to ISI. The

channel is a time invariant two-ray channel, where the two rays have equal power and are spaced seconds apart. In this case, the rms delay spread is = /2. Since we will compare systems with different symbol duration (different number of carriers for same total bandwidth), we will plot BER versus Eb/No curves using as a parameter the rms delay spread normalized to the symbol duration TS.

Figure 6 Case of mild ISI.

Figure 7 Case of severe ISI.

Two values of GI have been considered: 1.5/TS, and 2.5/TS. The first value of GI does not eliminate completely ISI, whereas the second GI value is adequate to eliminate most ISI. The effect of GI has been incorporated in the Eb/No calculation as an SNR penalty since, in OFDM systems, energy is wasted in the transmission of the GI. Note that this penalty was not included in previous analyses [15]. OFDM uses QPSK on all carriers, whereas W-OFDM uses 2PAM. M represents

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the number of transform points, therefore the number of carriers in W-OFDM is M and in OFDM is M/2. The two cases of mild and severe ISI are shown in Figure 6 and Figure 7. For the mild ISI case, W-OFDM is able to provide better performances than OFDM while still maintaining a 100% transmission efficiency. When ISI is more severe, W-OFDM is still able to provide better performances at low to moderate values of Eb/No, whereas OFDM performs better at high SNRs. However, the Eb/No value at which OFDM systems achieve lower BER is inversely proportional to the transmission efficiency, i.e. lower crossover points are obtained by decreasing the transmission efficiency of the OFDM system. At large SNRs, OFDM with adequate GI performs better than W-OFDM because ISI is greatly reduced or eliminated. However, since the power line channel is a noise dominated channel, the advantage of OFDM at large SNRs does not yield any practical benefits when compared to W-OFDM systems with adequate symbol duration. The quantitative results presented here contradict the results made in [15]. IV. SPECTRAL CHARACTERISTIC OF OFDM AND W-OFDM Power line cables may cause interference to existing wireless services as well as be the victim of RFI. Efficient reduction of electromagnetic leakage is very important in PLCs also because of the regulatory environment. This is accomplished in OFDM by notching sub-channels or using a notch filter in the frequency bands used by other systems. The former method degrades the efficiency of frequency usage and the latter method increases circuit scale. W-OFDM can easily reduce the PSD in those frequency bands that are used by other systems.

Windowing is a technique that replaces the usual rectangular window with more elaborate ones and can help OFDM achieve better spectral characteristics than conventional OFDM. Windowing is applied to the individual OFDM symbol, with the goal of making the amplitude go smoothly to zero at the symbol boundaries [4], [15]. This technique has several limitations. First of all, it increases considerably computational complexity. Second, in the case of PLCs, windowing should be done both at the transmitter (to obtain deep notches in correspondence of certain bands occupied by wireless services), and at the receiver (to provide robustness against NBI). Third, windowing is able to lower the second sidelobe at best from -13dB to -20dB below the main lobe [4]. This means that it is still necessary to notch several carriers to obtain deep notches. Fourth, the operation of windowing causes an increase of the GI length, which causes a further reduction of the system transmission efficiency [15].

Figure 9 PSD of W-OFDM (M=512).

W-OFDM does not suffer from the above mentioned drawbacks. In fact, introducing symbol overlap allows more degrees of freedom in optimizing the spectral characteristics of W-OFDM. Figure 9 shows the PSD of W-OFDM for the case of g=4 and of the prototype filter shown in Figure 5. The W-OFDM simulated here exhibits additional 22dB of stopband with respect to conventional OFDM and a notch depth of around -35dB is obtained by notching only two adjacent sub-carriers. Thus, W-OFDM achieves superior adjacent band rejection, better NBI resiliency, and better transmission efficiency than windowed OFDM.
Figure 8 PSD of conventional OFDM (M=512).

V. COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY We consider here the case that all OFDM symbols have the same length (except for the GI time) to make a fair comparison. In the following, indicates number of real multiplications and represents the number of additions.

Figure 8 shows the spectrum characteristic of conventional (rectangular windowing) OFDM. As the figure shows, in conventional OFDM sidelobes fall at most 13 dB under the main lobe. This limitation can be alleviated by windowing.

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A. Complex FFT The computational complexity of the complex FFT implemented using Radix-2 algorithm is: FFT ( M ) = 2M log 2 M 7M + 12 (8.a) FFT ( M ) = 3M log 2 M 3N + 4 (8.b) B. DCT-IV The computational requirements are that of one complex FFT over M/2 points plus M complex multiplications. So the computational complexity of the DCT-IV is DCT (M ) = FFT (M / 2) + 4 M (9.a) DCT ( M ) = FFT ( M / 2) + 2M (9.b) C. Extended Lapped Transform - ELT (g=4) The computational requirements are that of one DCT-IV over M points plus 2M real multiplications and 2M additions: ELT ( M ) = 2M + DCT ( M ) (10.a) DCT ( M ) = 2M + DCT (M ) (10.b)

VI. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK In this paper, we have compared OFDM and W-OFDM with respect to some specific aspects of the power line channel. On the basis of our investigation, we have concluded that W-OFDM is a better MCM scheme compared to OFDM because it exhibits higher transmission efficiency, deeper notches, robustness to NBI, and lower circuit cost as fewer carriers than in conventional or windowed OFDM can be used. REFERENCES
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D. Comparison Tables I and II compare the number of operations needed in OFDM and W-OFDM for 128M4,096, where M is the number of transform points. This confirms that W-OFDM does not suffer from higher computationally complexity than OFDM as claimed in [15].

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