Orthogonal poly-phase MC-CDMA over multipath power-line channels with Middleton class-A noise

This paper investigates the application of orthogonal poly-phase based multi-carrier code division multiple access (OPP-MC-CDMA) over multipath power-line channels perturbed by Middleton class-A noise. The proposed OPP-MC-CDMA system is aided with a minimum-mean square error equalizer combined with nonlinear preprocessing to overcome the effect of bursty noise and multipath fading. We study the performance of this system in terms of the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and symbol error rate with various constellation sizes of OPP codes, different noise scenarios and non-linear processor's thresholds. For comparison-sake, the performance of a conventional orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDM) scheme is included. The results reveal that the proposed approach always provides superior performance over the conventional OFDM system with a maximum output SNR gain of up to 5.25 dB. It is also shown that the performance of the OPP-MC-CDMA technique improves significantly with increasing the constellation size of the OPP codes.