Power line communications (PLC) surfers performance degradation due mainly to impulsive noise interference generated by electrical appliances. This thesis studies coded modulation techniques to improve the spectral efficiency and error performance of PLC. Considered in the first part is the application of bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) in class-A impulsive noise environment. In particular, the optimal soft-output demodulator and its suboptimal version are presented for an additive class-A noise (AWAN) channel so that iterative demodulation and decoding can be performed at the receiver. The effect of signal mapping on the error performance of BICM-ID systems in impulsive noise is then investigated, with both computer simulations and a tight error bound on the asymptotic performance. Extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart analysis is performed to illustrate the convergence properties of different mappings. The superior performance of BICMID compared to orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is also clearly demonstrated.Motivated by the successes of both BICM-ID and OFDM in improving the error performance of communications systems in impulsive noise environment, the second part of this thesis introduces a novel scheme of bit-interleaved coded OFDM with iterative decoding (BI-COFDM-ID) over the class-A impulsive noise channel. Here, an iterative receiver composed of outer and inner iteration loops is first described in detail. Error performance improvements of the proposed iterative receiver with different iteration strategies are presented and discussed. Performance comparisons of BI-COFDM-ID, BICM-ID and iteratively decoded OFDM are made to illustrate the superiority of BI-COFDM-ID. The effect of signal mapping on the error performance of BI-COFDM-ID is also studied
