  Communications over power lines in the frequency range above 2 MHz, commonly
referred to as broadband (BB) power line communications (PLC), has been the
focus of increasing research attention and standardization efforts in recent
years. BB-PLC channels are characterized by a dominant colored non-Gaussian
additive noise, as well as by periodic variations of the channel impulse
response and the noise statistics. In this work we study the fundamental rate
limits for BB-PLC channels by bounding their capacity while accounting for the
unique properties of these channels. We obtain explicit expressions for the
derived bounds for several BB-PLC noise models, and illustrate the resulting
fundamental limits in a numerical analysis.
