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In this paper, we consider transmission in relatively wide-stretched power line communication (PLC) networks, where repeaters are required to bridge the source-to-destination distance. In particular, it is assumed that each network node is a potential repeater and that multihop transmission is accomplished in an ad hoc fashion without the need for complex routing protocols. In such a scenario, due to the broadcasting nature of the power line channel, multiple repeater nodes may receive and retransmit the source message simultaneously. It is shown that, if no further signal processing is applied at the transmitter, simultaneous retransmission often deteriorates performance compared with single-node retransmission. We therefore advocate the application of distributed space-time block codes (DSTBCs) to the problem at hand. More specifically, we propose that each network node is assigned a unique signature sequence, which allows efficient combining at the receiver. Most notably, DSTBC-based retransmission does not require explicit collaboration among network nodes for multihop transmission and detection complexity is not increased compared with single-node retransmission. Numerical results for multihop transmission over PLC networks show that DSTBC-based retransmission achieves a considerably improved performance in terms of required transmit power and multihop delay compared with alternative retransmission strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design of power efficient receivers for Bluetooth systems is a challenging task due to stringent complexity constraints. In this paper, we tackle this problem and present a receiver design consisting of a single filter and a subsequent noncoherent sequence detector. This receiver outperforms the conventional discriminator detector by more than 4 dB for typical Bluetooth channels. Thereby, the proposed noncoherent sequence detection (NSD) algorithm is both favorably low complex as it operates on a two-state trellis and highly robust against channel phase variations caused by low-cost local oscillators. The particular filter design accomplishes effective out-of-band interference suppression. Different from previous work on sequence detector receivers published in the literature, we take possible variations of the Bluetooth modulation parameters into account, and we also devise efficient methods for combined NSD and forward error correction decoding. Hence, the presented receiver design is an attractive solution for practical Bluetooth devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]