Zero Padding Schemes for Power line Communications

This work investigates the effect of zero padding on power line communication (PLC). It does this by introducing different zero-padding schemes as guard interval into the base-band signal and the effect of the various scheme is evaluated with the aim of presenting a preferred scheme for PLC transmission. The paper proposes three zero padding schemes wich have been employed for transmission of the baseband signal using M-ary Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (M-QAM) within the subcarriers of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) symbol. The three different schemes showed a tight match at lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), However, at increased SNR, a noticable disparity is seen in favour of Scheme 3 of the proposed zero padding schemes.