Error performance of power line communications in the presence of Nakagami-mbackground noise

Abstract This paper studies the error performance of power line communication (PLC) systems, in the presence of background noise with Nakagami‐ m distributed envelope and uniformly distributed phase. In this sense, we present closed‐form expressions for the symbol error rate (SER) of PLC systems using binary pulse amplitude modulation and generalize the analysis to accommodate the M ‐ary pulse amplitude modulation. In addition, novel closed‐form expressions for the SER upper bound of rectangular quadrature amplitude modulation PLC systems are derived. Interestingly, these expressions can be considered as tight SER approximations in the high–signal‐to‐noise ratio region and, thus, can efficiently evaluate the operational bound of a PLC system.