A Novel OCDM-Based Sounding Sequence for a PLC Channel Measurement Methodology

This paper proposes a novel sounding sequence based on orthogonal chirp-division multiplexing (OCDM) for application in a power line communication (PLC) channel measurement methodology. The proposal integrates the Schmidl & Cox synchronization technique and utilizes a structure of consecutive orthogonal symbol blocks, with orthogonality achieved via circular shifting in the discrete-Fresnel domain. To evaluate its effectiveness, numerical results are presented in terms of the mean, standard deviation, and error rate of the estimated synchronization points for different numbers of symbol blocks, using a real dataset comprising PLC channel estimates collected in a measurement campaign. Compared to an existing OCDM-based sounding sequence, the results show that the proposed sounding sequence achieves a better symbol block synchronization with a lower error rate.