Performance Analysis of a Receive Diversity PLC System with Imperfect CSI in Nakagami-m Noise Environment

The paper proposes a receive diversity PLC system subject to uncorrelated Rayleigh multipath channels and corrupted by Nakagami-m background noise employing M-ary phase-shift keying modulation for data transmission. The estimates of the channel gains are obtained prior to data transmission by the minimum mean square estimation technique utilizing pilot symbol transmission. A suboptimal receiver structure employing the maximum likelihood decision rule is proposed for the PLC system which is further used to obtain the closed form and the asymptotic expressions for the symbol error probability of the system via a characteristic function approach. The improvement of the system performance with the increase in the channel diversity, the effects of the pilot-to-signal strength ratio, and the noise shape parameter m of the background noise on the system performance are studied via numerical results providing various insights into the design of the PLC system with various system parameters.