Patent ID: 8681883

Claim:
A method for operating a transmitter in order to transmit information through a powerline medium that includes at least three conductors, the method comprising: determining a power adjustment factor α based on data including channel-descriptive information, wherein the channel-descriptive information includes a channel estimate or parameters derived from the channel estimate, wherein the channel estimate is an estimate of a channel between two or more inputs of the powerline medium and one or more outputs of the powerline medium; operating on a symbol s of a symbol stream to obtain two or more transmit values, wherein the symbol stream is determined by a stream of information bits, wherein said operating on the symbol s includes computing a transmit vector x by multiplying the symbol s by the power adjustment factor α and by a vector c, wherein the vector c is a column of a precoding matrix, wherein the precoding matrix is derived from the channel estimate, wherein the two or more transmit values are specified by respective components of the transmit vector x; and transmitting the two or more transmit values, respectively, through the two or more inputs of the powerline medium, wherein the power adjustment factor α is determined so that power transmitted into the powerline medium is set to a predetermined value.