37 research outputs found
State-of-the-art in Power Line Communications: from the Applications to the Medium
In recent decades, power line communication has attracted considerable
attention from the research community and industry, as well as from regulatory
and standardization bodies. In this article we provide an overview of both
narrowband and broadband systems, covering potential applications, regulatory
and standardization efforts and recent research advancements in channel
characterization, physical layer performance, medium access and higher layer
specifications and evaluations. We also identify areas of current and further
study that will enable the continued success of power line communication
technology.Comment: 19 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication, IEEE Journal on
Selected Areas in Communications. Special Issue on Power Line Communications
and its Integration with the Networking Ecosystem. 201
Fifty Years of Noise Modeling and Mitigation in Power-Line Communications.
Building on the ubiquity of electric power infrastructure, power line communications (PLC) has been successfully used in diverse application scenarios, including the smart grid and in-home broadband communications systems as well as industrial and home automation. However, the power line channel exhibits deleterious properties, one of which is its hostile noise environment. This article aims for providing a review of noise modeling and mitigation techniques in PLC. Specifically, a comprehensive review of representative noise models developed over the past fifty years is presented, including both the empirical models based on measurement campaigns and simplified mathematical models. Following this, we provide an extensive survey of the suite of noise mitigation schemes, categorizing them into mitigation at the transmitter as well as parametric and non-parametric techniques employed at the receiver. Furthermore, since the accuracy of channel estimation in PLC is affected by noise, we review the literature of joint noise mitigation and channel estimation solutions. Finally, a number of directions are outlined for future research on both noise modeling and mitigation in PLC
Cooperative Relaying In Power Line Environment: A Survey and Tutorial
Exchange of information is essential in any society and the demand for faster, cheaper, and secure
communications is increasing every day. With other hi-tech initiatives like IPv6 and Internet-of-Things (IOT) already
in the horizon, demand for broadband is set to escalate beyond its current level. Inherently laden in the challenges
posed by this technology are fresh opportunities in terms of penetration of data services into rural communities and
development of innovative strategies for more efficient use of the grid. Though still in its developmental phase/stage,
Power Line Communication (PLC) has grown beyond theoretical fantasy to become a reality. The proofs are the
readily available PLC systems that can be purchased off the shelfto achieve in-house networking and the much talked
about, smart metering technology; generally regarded as the “new bride” in utilities industry. One of the biggest gains
of PLC is its use of existing electrical cables, thereby eliminating cost of installation and maintenance of data cables.
However, given that the power infrastructure was traditionally built to deliver electricity, data signals do suffer various
forms of distortions and impairments as they transit it. This paper presents a tutorial on the deployed wireless system
technique which is to be adapted to PLC scenario for the purpose of managing the available source energy for
achieving reliable communication system. One of these techniques is the cooperative diversity. Its application and
deployment in power line environment is explored. The improvement achieved through cooperative diversity in some
PLC systems were presented along with the associated limitations. Finally, future areas of research which will further
improve the reliability of PLC systems and reduce its power consumption during transmission is shown
Resource allocation technique for powerline network using a modified shuffled frog-leaping algorithm
Resource allocation (RA) techniques should be made efficient and optimized in order to enhance the QoS (power & bit, capacity, scalability) of high-speed networking data applications. This research attempts to further increase the efficiency towards near-optimal performance. RA’s problem involves assignment of subcarriers, power and bit amounts for each user efficiently. Several studies conducted by the Federal Communication Commission have proven that conventional RA approaches are becoming insufficient for rapid demand in networking resulted in spectrum underutilization, low capacity and convergence, also low performance of bit error rate, delay of channel feedback, weak scalability as well as computational complexity make real-time solutions intractable. Mainly due to sophisticated, restrictive constraints, multi-objectives, unfairness, channel noise, also unrealistic when assume perfect channel state is available. The main goal of this work is to develop a conceptual framework and mathematical model for resource allocation using Shuffled Frog-Leap Algorithm (SFLA). Thus, a modified SFLA is introduced and integrated in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system. Then SFLA generated random population of solutions (power, bit), the fitness of each solution is calculated and improved for each subcarrier and user. The solution is numerically validated and verified by simulation-based powerline channel. The system performance was compared to similar research works in terms of the system’s capacity, scalability, allocated rate/power, and convergence. The resources allocated are constantly optimized and the capacity obtained is constantly higher as compared to Root-finding, Linear, and Hybrid evolutionary algorithms. The proposed algorithm managed to offer fastest convergence given that the number of iterations required to get to the 0.001% error of the global optimum is 75 compared to 92 in the conventional techniques. Finally, joint allocation models for selection of optima resource values are introduced; adaptive power and bit allocators in OFDM system-based Powerline and using modified SFLA-based TLBO and PSO are propose
Improvement of indoor environment signal reception using PLC-RF diversity techniques
D.Ing. (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)Abstract: Please refer to full text to view abstract
Sparsity-Based Joint NBI and impulse noise mitigation in hybrid PLC-Wireless transmissions
We propose a new sparsity-aware framework to model and mitigate the joint effects of narrow-band interference (NBI) and impulsive noise (IN) in hybrid powerline and unlicensed wireless communication systems. The proposed mitigation techniques, based on the principles of compressive sensing, exploit the inherent (non-contiguous or contiguous) sparse structures of NBI and IN in the frequency and time domains, respectively. For the non-contiguous NBI and IN, we develop a multi-level orthogonal matching pursuit recovery algorithm that exploits prior knowledge about the sparsity level at each receive antenna and powerline to further reduce computational complexity without performance loss. In addition, for the non-contiguous asynchronous NBI scenario, we investigate the application of time-domain windowing to enhance the NBI's sparsity and, hence, improve the NBI mitigation performance. For the contiguous NBI and IN scenario, we estimate the NBI and IN signals by modeling their burstiness as block-sparse vectors with and without prior knowledge of the bursts' boundaries. Moreover, we show how to exploit the spatial correlations of the NBI and IN across the receive antennas and powerlines to convert a non-contiguous NBI and IN problem to a block-sparse estimation problem with much lower complexity. Furthermore, we investigate a Bayesian linear minimum mean square error-based approach for estimating both non-contiguous and contiguous NBI and IN based on their second-order statistics to further improve the estimation performance. Finally, our numerical results illustrate the superiority of the joint processing of our proposed NBI and IN sparsity-based mitigation techniques compared to separate processing of the wireless and powerline received signals. 2013 IEEE.This work was supported by NPRP through the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation) under Grant NPRP 8-627-2-260.Scopu
On Performance Characterization of Cascaded Multiwire-PLC/MIMO-RF Communication System
The flexibility of radio frequency (RF) systems and the omnipresence of power
cables potentially make the cascaded power line communication (PLC)/RF system
an efficient and cost-effective solution in terms of wide coverage and
high-speed transmission. This letter proposes an opportunistic
decode-and-forward (DF)-based multi-wire/RF relaying system to exploit the
advantages of both techniques. The outage probability, bit error rate, and
system channel capacity are correspondingly chosen to analyze the properties of
the proposed system, which are derived in closed-form expressions and validated
via Monte-Carlo simulations. One can observe that our proposed system
outperforms the wireless-only system in terms of coverage and data rate,
especially when there exists a non-line-of-sight (NLoS) connection between the
transmitter and receiver pair.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
Multichannel power line communication
Power line communication (PLC) is the technology in which the data signals of a communication system are transmitted through the conductors of a power delivery infrastructure. The unique environment of the PLC channels create specific challenges and requirements, which need to be modeled and analyzed properly in order to obtain a clear understanding of the communication system as well as attaining the ability to further improve the performance and reliability of the transmission. Moreover, the demand for increased data throughput as well as increased reliability and robustness of the transmission is of fundamental importance in any communication system as it is in PLC systems. In order to address these challenges and demands, the concept of multichannel PLC is studied and developed in this thesis. Multichannel PLC in this context is referred to the transmission of multiple information-carrying signals though the power line channel from one source to one destination.
We study multiple scenarios of multichannel data transmission in order to cover the diverse situations and requirements of a PLC transmission. One of the multichannel scenarios discussed in this thesis is the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission, in which multiple data signals are transmitted via spatially separated PLC channels. Another scenario discussed in this thesis is the cooperative transmission between the source and destination of a PLC system by means of intermediate relay nodes in the network. Finally, the multiband transmission by utilizing different parts of the available PLC spectrum is studied. The core objective of this thesis is to develop and study novel algorithms and models to address the challenges and problems introduced in different scenarios of the multichannel PLC. These problems can be categorized as the channel selection problem for MIMO transmission, the relay selection problem for the cooperative communication, and the spectrum assignment problem for the multiband transmission. The basis of all these problems is a decision making problem, which can greatly influence the performance of the system.
To address these decision making problems, a powerful mathematical tool, namely the multi-armed bandit model, is used to model the different problems emerging in different scenarios of the multichannel PLC. This modeling approach is then used as a building block for developing machine learning algorithms in order to solve the aforementioned selection problems. Finally, novel machine learning algorithms are developed and their performances are analyzed and assessed. It is shown that the machine learning approach can considerably improve the performance of the multichannel PLC systems compared to the existing state of the art approaches, by enabling the selecting agent, i.e. the PLC transmitter, to perform intelligent decisions which improves the overall performance.Die Power-Line-Communication (PLC) ist die Technologie, bei der die Datensignale eines Kommunikationssystems über die Leiter einer Energieversorgungsinfrastruktur übertragen werden. Die einzigartige Umgebung der PLC-Kanäle stellt konkrete Herausforderungen und Anforderungen dar, die modelliert und analysiert werden müssen, um ein klares Verständnis des Kommunikationssystems zu erhalten und die Fähigkeit zur Verbesserung der Leistung und Zuverlässigkeit der Übertragung zu erreichen. Darüber hinaus ist in Kommunikationssystem die Nachfrage nach erhöhtem Datendurchsatz, sowie erhöhter Zuverlässigkeit und Robustheit der Übertragung von grundlegender Bedeutung. Um diesen Herausforderungen und Anforderungen gerecht zu werden, wird in dieser Arbeit das Konzept der Mehrkanal-PLC untersucht und weiterentwickelt. Die Mehrkanal-PLC wird in diesem Zusammenhang auf die Übertragung mehrerer informationstragenden Signale über den PLC-Kanal von einer Quelle zu einem Ziel bezogen.
Wir untersuchen mehrere Szenarien der Mehrkanal-Datenübertragung, um die vielfältigen Anforderungen einer PLC-Übertragung zu behandeln. Eines der in dieser Arbeit besprochenen Mehrkanal-Szenarien ist die Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output-Übertragung (MIMO), bei der mehrere Datensignale über räumlich getrennte PLC-Kanäle übertragen werden. Ein weiteres Szenario, das in dieser Arbeit diskutiert wird, ist die kooperative Übertragung zwischen der Quelle und dem Ziel eines PLC-Systems mittels Zwischenrelais als Knoten im Netzwerk. Schließlich wird die Multiband-Übertragung unter Verwendung unterschiedlicher Teile des verfügbaren PLC-Spektrums untersucht. Das Kernziel dieser Arbeit ist es, neuartige Algorithmen und Modelle zu entwickeln und zu untersuchen, um die Herausforderungen und Probleme zu lösen, die in verschiedenen Szenarien der Mehrkanal-PLC existieren. Diese Probleme sind als das Kanalauswahlproblem für die MIMO-Übertragung, das Relaiauswahlproblem für die kooperative Kommunikation und das Spektrum-Zuweisungsproblem für die Multibandübertragung kategorisiert werden. Die Basis all dieser Probleme ist ein Entscheidungsproblem, das die Leistungsfähigkeit des Systems stark beeinflussen kann.
Um diese Probleme lösen zu können, wird ein mathematisches Werkzeug, nämlich das mehrarmige Bandit-Modell, verwendet, um die verschiedenen Probleme zu modellieren, die sich in verschiedenen Szenarien der Mehrkanal-PLC ergeben. Dieser Modellierungsansatz wird als Baustein für die Entwicklung von maschinellen Lernalgorithmen verwendet, um die zuvor beschriebenen Auswahlprobleme zu lösen. Schließlich werden neuartige maschinelle Lernalgorithmen entwickelt und ihre Leistungen analysiert sowie bewertet. Es zeigt sich, dass der maschinelle Lernansatz die Leistungsfähigkeit der Mehrkanal-PLC-Systeme im Vergleich zu den bestehenden Ans\"atzen des Standes der Technik erheblich verbessern kann, indem es dem Auswahlagenten, d.h. dem PLC-Sender, ermöglicht, intelligente Entscheidungen durchzuführen, die die Gesamtleistung verbessern
Cross-layer energy efficiency of plc systems for smart grid applications
Though opinions are still divided over the specific choices of technology for
smart grid, there is a consensus that heterogeneous communications network
is most appropriate. Power line communication (PLC) is promising because
it is readily available and it aligns with the natural topology of power distribution
network. One of the emerging realities is that the communication
system enabling smart grid must be energy-efficient. This thesis employs a
cross-layer approach to address energy efficiency of PLC networks in different
smart grid scenarios.
At network layer, this work exploits the topology of a PLC-enabled advanced
metering infrastructure (AMI) to improve the probability of successful
packet delivery across the network. The technique, termed AMI clustering,
leverages the traditional structure of the low voltage (LV) network by organising
the smart meters into clusters and locally aggregating their readings.
Improvement in packet delivery inherently reduces energy wastage.
Next, the adaptation layer exploits the low data rate transmission techniques
to reduce the energy requirements of PLC nodes. To achieve that, this
work developed a network model in NS-3 (an open-source network simulator)
that considers PLC transceivers as resource-constrained devices and interconnects
them to emulate home energy management system (HEMS). The model
was validated with experimental results which showed that in the home area
network (HAN), low-rate applications such as energy management can be
supported over low-power PLC networks.
Furthermore, at physical layer, this thesis proposes a more energy-efficient
multi-carrier modulation scheme than the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM) used in most of the current PLC systems. OFDM is widely known for its high peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR) which degrades energy
efficiency of the systems. This thesis found that by employing vector-
OFDM (V-OFDM), power requirements of PLC transmitter can be reduced.
The results also showed the energy efficiency can be further improved by
using a dynamic noise cancellation technique such as dynamic peak-based
threshold estimation (DPTE) at the receiver.
By applying the proposed methods, packet delivery can be improved by
3% at network layer (which conserves energy) and reduced data rate can save
about 2.6014 dB in transmit power. Finally, at physical layer, V-OFDM and
DPTE can respectively provide 5.8 dB and 2.1 dB reduction in power requirements
of the PLC transceivers. These signify that if V-OFDM is combined
with DPTE, future PLC modems could benefit from energy-efficient power
amplifiers at reduced cost
Emulation of Narrowband Powerline Data Transmission Channels and Evaluation of PLC Systems
This work proposes advanced emulation of the physical layer behavior of NB-PLC channels and the application of a channel emulator for the evaluation of NB-PLC systems. In addition, test procedures and reference channels are proposed to improve efficiency and accuracy in the system evaluation and classification. This work shows that the channel emulator-based solution opens new ways toward flexible, reliable and technology-independent performance assessment of PLC modems