Efficient decoding over power-line channels

Power-line communications, conceived as an enabling technology for data networking alternative, is known to be susceptible to impulsive noises to attain assured transmission rate. To combat this obstacle, we design an efficient decoding scheme to incorporate erasures into the Viterbi algorithm. A unique feature of the decoding scheme is that it does not need the detailed knowledge of impulse statistics and only requires an estimate of impulse arrival probability. Surprisingly, our simulation results show that the proposed decoding scheme is on par with its optimal counterpart, where the exact impulse statistics is assumed to be known at receiver, in terms of bit error rate.