Labeling classification for 3D-BPSK and its application in powerline communications

Powerline communications (PLC) have gained heightened interest in recent years. PLC G3, a newly developed specification for narrowband PLC, uses DBPSK/DQPSK as its modulation to provide a data rate up to 33.4kbps. In this paper, we propose to use 3D-BPSK in PLC G3 to lower the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) threshold of the system with iterative demapping and decoding (ID). To optimize the performance of ID systems, 3D-BPSK labelings are classified into 33 groups based on the criteria of constellation mapping operators and Hamming-Euclidean distance (HED) spectrum. The optimal labeling is selected through exhaustive searching over the 33 groups by means of curve fitting on extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart. Simulation results show that the proposed system can achieve up to 1.0 dB iterative gain under AWGN channel.