Home networks must meet increasingly higher demands which will require the use of multiple communication media. Wireless and powerline communication (PLC) channels are a natural combination due to their ability to provide extensive in-home coverage. This thesis focuses on improving the performance of indoor communication links by using the wireless and PLC channels for diversity. This thesis makes a contribution in several areas related to wireless/PLC diversity communication. First, a low-cost architecture based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is presented and several optimum and suboptimum methods for received signal combining are developed. As the PLC channel contains impulsive noise, a low-complexity nonlinear combining technique based on a saturated Gaussian metric is proposed. Second, the actual characteristics of parallel wireless and PLC channels are measured in several detached homes. The measurements reveal that wireless and PLC signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) have a wide range and are relatively uncorrelated. This leads to the conclusion that diversity can be of benefit in many home networking scenarios. Finally, the performance of optimum and suboptimum combining schemes is evalu­ated using theoretical analysis and channel measurement data. Results show that the saturated metric scheme performs well when PLC noise is highly impulsive and conven­tional linear combining schemes perform well when PLC noise is mildly impulsive. A Monte Carlo simulation of an OFDM communication link shows that the likelihood of low throughput links can be significantly reduced when wireless and PLC channels are used for diversity.

A few pages are in colour.

Bibliography: p. 129-140