Abstract: “Multicarrier spread spectrum (MC-SS) systems exhibit good robustness against all kinds of narrowband interference, coloured noise or selective attenuation for power line communications. However, the systems’ vulnerability to frequency synchronization errors, which introduce loss of orthogonality between the subcarriers, is still a challenging problem for robust communications. This paper presents a novel multicarrier spread spectrum system with carrier frequency error estimation and low complexity by frequency division multiple access (FDMA) approach to cope with highly unpredictable harsh power line channel. Experimental results demonstrate that the frequency error estimation and compensation based on a successive phase difference measurement can achieve performance near to that without frequency errors, leading to robust communications for smart grid applications.”

Keywords: multicarrier spread spetrum system, frequency error estimation and compensation, power line communications