Assessment of an Artificial Noise Scheme in PLC Systems under the Presence of a Passive WLC Eavesdropper

This study investigates the information security in a discrete multitone-based power line communication (PLC) system when a wireless communication eavesdropper tries to obtain private information and the PLC transmitter combats it with an artificial noise scheme designed to degrade the eavesdropper's signal-to-noise ratio only. The numerical results showed that the artificial noise significantly degrades the eavesdropper's bit error rate (BER) compared to the legitimate receiver's BER.