Hybrid powerline and visible light communication (HPV) systems offer a cost-effective method of providing high-speed communication in indoor and outdoor environments, for the realisation of internet of things (IoT). However, in the HPV system the powerline communication (PLC) channel is inherently susceptible to impulse noise (IN) due to electrical appliances randomly connected to the powerline. This adversely affects the HPV system's bit error rate (BER) performance. In this paper, a time-diversity Hermitian symmetry (TDHS) scheme, which mitigates the effects of IN in a PLC channel is proposed. The scheme employs the Hermitian symmetry structure to recover information symbols likely to have been affected by the IN. By using the TDHS scheme, the probability of the effect of IN on data symbols through a PLC channel, is drastically reduced by 75%. By simulations, the effectiveness of the TDHS scheme is demonstrated via the enhanced BER performance of the system. The TDHS scheme is then implemented over a permutation coded HPV system using the amplify-and-forward protocol at the PLC-VLC integration unit and the Hungarian-Murty (HM) soft-decision decoder at the destination. The combination of the TDHS scheme and the HM decoder in a coded system provides further BER performance enhancement, exceeding 10 dB gain in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at a BER of 10 −4 .
INDEX TERMSHermitian symmetry, hybrid powerline and visible light communication, impulse noise, time-diversity. I. INTRODUCTION 17 Smart homes, smart cities, smart mines, wearables and con-18 nected cars are just but a few areas where the internet of 19 things (IoT) has developed and will continue to grow [1], [2], 20 [3]. This growth demands increasingly wide coverage areas, 21 high capacities and data rates to maintain reliable and ubiq-22 uitous connectivity of several smart devices and machines, 23 157 that simultaneously exploiting the advantages of the clip-158 ping and blanking schemes by combining them yields better 159 results, compared to using the two schemes independently. 160 While, in [43], pre-processing the signal at the transmitter 161 was proposed and shown to enhance the performance of 162 the blanking/clipping-based techniques for IN mitigation in 163 powerline channels. In [45], simple iterative impulsive noise 164 suppression algorithms that exploit the noise structure in 165 the time and frequency domain, were shown to improve the 166 performance of the OFDM receiver. Further, in [44], the 167 performance of the PLC system was enhanced by preceding 168 the iterative algorithms discussed in [45] with a clipping and 169 nulling technique. Noting the inherent issue of high peak-170 to-average power ratio (PAPR) of the transmitted signal in 171 OFDM-based systems, various studies have proposed and 172 used some variations of the OFDM techniques in PLC. For 173 example, vector OFDM (VOFDM) has been reported to 174 exhibit lower PAPR than conventional OFDM [46], [47], con-550 only slightly compared to the description in Section III-B1.551The di...