Power Line Communication Technologies: Modeling and Simulation of PRIME Physical Layer

Power Line Communications is a relatively new area of telecommunication. PLC employs full duplex methods for transmitting data over power lines as medium of transmission of electrical signals over a grid. PLC technologies are used in advanced meter reading, home automation and Public street lighting. Several PLC technologies classified based on the operational frequency range, are explored in this paper. PRIME is a new NBPLC system, which uses OFDM in its physical layer, for power line communication in the last mile. This work also focused on PRIME’s physical specifications, which was modeled in MATLAB/SIMULINK. In this paper, the performance of PRIME when its data is modulated using DQPSK and 4-QAM in four (4) channel models is shown.

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

Power Line Communication (PLC) Impulsive Noise Mitigation: A Review

Power Line Communication (PLC) is a technology which transforms the power line into pathways for the conveyance of broadband data. It has the advantage for it can avoid new installation since the current installation used for electrical power can also be used for data transmission. However, this power line channel presents a harsh environment for data transmission owing to the challenges of impulsive noise, high attenuation, selective fading and etc. Impulsive noise poses a severe challenge as its Power Spectral Density (PSD) is between 10–15dB above background noise. For good performance of the PLC system, this noise must be mitigated.  This paper presents a review of the techniques for the mitigation of impulsive noise in PLC which is classified into four categories, namely time domain, time/frequency domain, error correction code and other techniques. Time domain technique is a memoryless nonlinear technique where the signal's amplitude only changes according to a specified threshold without changing the phase.  Mitigation of impulsive noise is carried out on the received time domain signal before the demodulation FFT operation of the OFDM. Time/Frequency technique is a method of mitigating impulsive noise on the received signal at both before FFT demodulation and after FFT demodulation of the OFDM system. Error correction code technique is the application of forward error correction code by adding redundancy bits to the useful data bits for detection and possibly correction of error occurring during transmission.  Identifying the best performing technique will enhance the deployment of the technique while exploring the PLC channel capacity enhancement in the future. The best performing scheme in each of the category were selected and their BER vs SNR curves were compared with respect to the impulsive noise + awgn curve. Amongst all of these techniques, the error correction code technique had a performance that presents almost an outright elimination of impulsive noise in power line channel. Keywords: Impulsive noise, time domain, time/frequency domain, error correction code, sparse Bayesian learning, recursive detection and modified PLC-DMT

PLC for the smart grid: state-of-the-art and challenges

This paper aims to review systems and applications for power line communications (PLC) in the context of the smart grid. We discuss the main applications and summarise state-of-the-art PLC systems and standards. We report efforts and challenges in channel and noise modelling, as well as in state-of-the-art transmission technology approaches