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

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

Investigation of non-binary trellis codes designed for impulsive noise environments

PhD ThesisIt is well known that binary codes with iterative decoders can achieve near Shannon limit performance on the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, but their performance on more realistic wired or wireless channels can become degraded due to the presence of burst errors or impulsive noise. In such extreme environments, error correction alone cannot combat the serious e ect of the channel and must be combined with the signal processing techniques such as channel estimation, channel equalisation and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). However, even after the received signal has been processed, it can still contain burst errors, or the noise present in the signal maybe non Gaussian. In these cases, popular binary coding schemes such as Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) or turbo codes may not perform optimally, resulting in the degradation of performance. Nevertheless, there is still scope for the design of new non-binary codes that are more suitable for these environments, allowing us to achieve further gains in performance. In this thesis, an investigation into good non-binary trellis error-correcting codes and advanced noise reduction techniques has been carried out with the aim of enhancing the performance of wired and wireless communication networks in di erent extreme environments. These environments include, urban, indoor, pedestrian, underwater, and powerline communication (PLC). This work includes an examination of the performance of non-binary trellis codes in harsh scenarios such as underwater communications when the noise channel is additive S S noise. Similar work was also conducted for single input single output (SISO) power line communication systems for single carrier (SC) and multi carrier (MC) over realistic multi-path frequency selective channels. A further examination of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) wired and wireless systems on Middleton class A noise channel was carried out. The main focus of the project was non-binary coding schemes as it is well-known that they outperform their binary counterparts when the channel is bursty. However, few studies have investigated non-binary codes for other environments. The major novelty of this work is the comparison of the performance of non-binary trellis codes with binary trellis codes in various scenarios, leading to the conclusion that non-binary codes are, in most cases, superior in performance to binary codes. Furthermore, the theoretical bounds of SISO and MIMO binary and non-binary convolutional coded OFDM-PLC systems have been investigated for the rst time. In order to validate our results, the implementation of simulated and theoretical results have been obtained for di erent values of noise parameters and on di erent PLC channels. The results show a strong agreement between the simulated and theoretical analysis for all cases.University of Thi-Qar for choosing me for their PhD scholarship and the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Scienti c Research (MOHESR) for granting me the funds to study in UK. In addition, there was ample support towards my stay in the UK from the Iraqi Cultural Attach e in Londo

Coded-OFDM for PLC systems in non-Gaussian noise channels

PhD ThesisNowadays, power line communication (PLC) is a technology that uses the power line grid for communication purposes along with transmitting electrical energy, for providing broadband services to homes and offices such as high-speed data, audio, video and multimedia applications. The advantages of this technology are to eliminate the need for new wiring and AC outlet plugs by using an existing infrastructure, ease of installation and reduction of the network deployment cost. However, the power line grid is originally designed for the transmission of the electric power at low frequencies; i.e. 50/60 Hz. Therefore, the PLC channel appears as a harsh medium for low-power high-frequency communication signals. The development of PLC systems for providing high-speed communication needs precise knowledge of the channel characteristics such as the attenuation, non-Gaussian noise and selective fading. Non-Gaussian noise in PLC channels can classify into Nakagami-m background interference (BI) noise and asynchronous impulsive noise (IN) modelled by a Bernoulli-Gaussian mixture (BGM) model or Middleton class A (MCA) model. Besides the effects of the multipath PLC channel, asynchronous impulsive noise is the main reason causing performance degradation in PLC channels. Binary/non-binary low-density parity check B/NB-(LDPC) codes and turbo codes (TC) with soft iterative decoders have been proposed for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system to improve the bit error rate (BER) performance degradation by exploiting frequency diversity. The performances are investigated utilizing high-order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) in the presence of non-Gaussian noise over multipath broadband power-line communication (BBPLC) channels. OFDM usually spreads the effect of IN over multiple sub-carriers after discrete Fourier transform (DFT) operation at the receiver, hence, it requires only a simple single-tap zero forcing (ZF) equalizer at the receiver. The thesis focuses on improving the performance of iterative decoders by deriving the effective, complex-valued, ratio distributions of the noise samples at the zeroforcing (ZF) equalizer output considering the frequency-selective multipath PLCs, background interference noise and impulsive noise, and utilizing the outcome for computing the apriori log likelihood ratios (LLRs) required for soft decoding algorithms. On the other hand, Physical-Layer Network Coding (PLNC) is introduced to help the PLC system to extend the range of operation for exchanging information between two users (devices) using an intermediate relay (hub) node in two-time slots in the presence of non-Gaussian noise over multipath PLC channels. A novel detection scheme is proposed to transform the transmit signal constellation based on the frequency-domain channel coefficients to optimize detection at the relay node with newly derived noise PDF at the relay and end nodes. Additionally, conditions for optimum detection utilizing a high-order constellation are derived. The closedform expressions of the BER and average BER upper-bound (AUB) are derived for a point-to-point system, and for a PLNC system at the end node to relay, relay to end node and at the end-to-end nodes. Moreover, the convergence behaviour of iterative decoders is evaluated using EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) chart analysis and upper bound analyses. Furthermore, an optimization of the threshold determination for clipping and blanking impulsive noise mitigation methods are derived. The proposed systems are compared in performance using simulation in MATLAB and analytical methods.Ministry of Higher Education in Ira

Communications protocols for wireless sensor networks in perturbed environment

This thesis is mainly in the Smart Grid (SG) domain. SGs improve the safety of electrical networks and allow a more adapted use of electricity storage, available in a limited way. SGs also increase overall energy efficiency by reducing peak consumption. The use of this technology is the most appropriate solution because it allows more efficient energy management. In this context, manufacturers such as Hydro-Quebec deploy sensor networks in the nerve centers to control major equipment. To reduce deployment costs and cabling complexity, the option of a wireless sensor network seems the most obvious solution. However, deploying a sensor network requires in-depth knowledge of the environment. High voltages substations are strategic points in the power grid and generate impulse noise that can degrade the performance of wireless communications. The works in this thesis are focused on the development of high performance communication protocols for the profoundly disturbed environments. For this purpose, we have proposed an approach based on the concatenation of rank metric and convolutional coding with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. This technique is very efficient in reducing the bursty nature of impulsive noise while having a quite low level of complexity. Another solution based on a multi-antenna system is also designed. We have proposed a cooperative closed-loop coded MIMO system based on rank metric code and max−dmin precoder. The second technique is also an optimal solution for both improving the reliability of the system and energy saving in wireless sensor networks

Advanced Coding And Modulation For Ultra-wideband And Impulsive Noises

The ever-growing demand for higher quality and faster multimedia content delivery over short distances in home environments drives the quest for higher data rates in wireless personal area networks (WPANs). One of the candidate IEEE 802.15.3a WPAN proposals support data rates up to 480 Mbps by using punctured convolutional codes with quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation for a multi-band orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) system over ultra wideband (UWB) channels. In the first part of this dissertation, we combine more powerful near-Shannon-limit turbo codes with bandwidth efficient trellis coded modulation, i.e., turbo trellis coded modulation (TTCM), to further improve the data rates up to 1.2 Gbps. A modified iterative decoder for this TTCM coded MB-OFDM system is proposed and its bit error rate performance under various impulsive noises over both Gaussian and UWB channel is extensively investigated, especially in mismatched scenarios. A robust decoder which is immune to noise mismatch is provided based on comparison of impulsive noises in time domain and frequency domain. The accurate estimation of the dynamic noise model could be very difficult or impossible at the receiver, thus a significant performance degradation may occur due to noise mismatch. In the second part of this dissertation, we prove that the minimax decoder in \cite, which instead of minimizing the average bit error probability aims at minimizing the worst bit error probability, is optimal and robust to certain noise model with unknown prior probabilities in two and higher dimensions. Besides turbo codes, another kind of error correcting codes which approach the Shannon capacity is low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. In the last part of this dissertation, we extend the density evolution method for sum-product decoding using mismatched noises. We will prove that as long as the true noise type and the estimated noise type used in the decoder are both binary-input memoryless output symmetric channels, the output from mismatched log-likelihood ratio (LLR) computation is also symmetric. We will show the Shannon capacity can be evaluated for mismatched LLR computation and it can be reduced if the mismatched LLR computation is not an one-to-one mapping function. We will derive the Shannon capacity, threshold and stable condition of LDPC codes for mismatched BIAWGN and BIL noise types. The results show that the noise variance estimation errors will not affect the Shannon capacity and stable condition, but the errors do reduce the threshold. The mismatch in noise type will only reduce Shannon capacity when LLR computation is based on BIL

Techniques for broadband power line communications: impulsive noise mitigation and adaptive modulation

The development of power line communication systems for broadband multimedia applications requires a comprehensive knowledge of the channel characteristics and the main peculiarities that may influence the communication over this channel. PLC has the potential to become the preferred connectivity solution to homes and offices. Additionally, indoor power line networks can serve as local area networks offering high-speed data, audio, video and multimedia applications. The PLC technology eliminates the need for new wires by using an already-existing infrastructure that is much more pervasive than any other wired system. Power line networks, however, present a hostile channel for communication signals. Noise, multipath, selective fading and attenuation are well-known peculiarities of power line grids and. Particularly, random impulsive noise characterized with short durations and very high amplitudes is identified as one of the major impairments that degrade the performance of PLC systems. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is the technique of choice for broadband PLC systems. OFDM minimizes the effects of multipath and provides high robustness against selective fading. It is also powerful in impulsive noise environments and performs better than single-carrier modulation methods. If an OFDM symbol is affected by impulsive noise, the effect is spread over multiple subcarriers due to the discrete Fourier transform at the receiver. In order to achieve reliable outcomes, suitable channel and noise models must be used in the investigations. In this thesis, the power line channel transfer function is modelled using a multipath model that was proposed by Zimmermann and Dostert [1], [2]. This model describes the signal propagation scenario and attenuation effects in power line networks. To represent the actual noise scenario in power networks, the noise is classified into two main classes: background noise and impulsive noise. To reduce the effect of impulsive noise, conventional time domain nonlinearities are examined in this thesis under PLC environments. An adaptive-threshold selection method based on minimum bit-error rate (BER) is proposed. At the cost of additional complexity, the effect of impulsive noise is further mitigated using a novel joint time-domain/frequency-domain suppression technique. Since channel coding is essential for most telecommunication systems, we examine convolutional codes combined with interleaving in a PLC channel impaired with AWGN and impulsive noise. The results show substantial performance gains especially in heavily-disturbed environments, where signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gains of more than 15 dB can be achieved with a code rate of 1/3. Bit-interleaved convolutionally-coded OFDM completely eliminates the effect of impulsive noise in weakly-disturbed noise environments, while a negligible effect may remain in medium-disturbed environments. A new power-loading algorithm that minimizes the transmission power for target BER and data rate constraints is introduced in later chapters of the thesis. Results indicate that the algorithm achieves performance gains of more than 4 dB SNR over conventional OFDM systems. Furthermore, a novel minimum-complexity bit-loading algorithm that maximizes the data rate given BER and power level constraints is proposed in chapter 6. Results show that this bit-loading algorithm achieves almost identical performance as the incremental algorithm but with much lower complexity

Robust wireless sensor network for smart grid communication : modeling and performance evaluation

Our planet is gradually heading towards an energy famine due to growing population and industrialization. Hence, increasing electricity consumption and prices, diminishing fossil fuels and lack significantly in environment-friendliness due to their emission of greenhouse gasses, and inefficient usage of existing energy supplies have caused serious network congestion problems in many countries in recent years. In addition to this overstressed situation, nowadays, the electric power system is facing many challenges, such as high maintenance cost, aging equipment, lack of effective fault diagnostics, power supply reliability, etc., which further increase the possibility of system breakdown. Furthermore, the adaptation of the new renewable energy sources with the existing power plants to provide an alternative way for electricity production transformed it in a very large and complex scale, which increases new issues. To address these challenges, a new concept of next generation electric power system, called the "smart grid", has emerged in which Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are playing the key role. For a reliable smart grid, monitoring and control of power system parameters in the transmission and distribution segments are crucial. This necessitates the deployment of a robust communication network within the power grid. Traditionally, power grid communications are realized through wired communications, including power line communication (PLC). However, the cost of its installation might be expensive especially for remote control and monitoring applications. More recently, plenty of research interests have been drawn to the wireless communications for smart grid applications. In this regard, the most promising methods of smart grid monitoring explored in the literature is based on wireless sensor network (WSN). Indeed, the collaborative nature of WSN brings significant advantages over the traditional wireless networks, including low-cost, wider coverage, self-organization, and rapid deployment. Unfortunately, harsh and hostile electric power system environments pose great challenges in the reliability of sensor node communications because of strong RF interference and noise called impulsive noise. On account of the fundamental of WSN-based smart grid communications and the possible impacts of impulsive noise on the reliability of sensor node communications, this dissertation is supposed to further fill the lacking of the existing research outcomes. To be specific, the contributions of this dissertation can be summarized as three fold: (i) investigation and performance analysis of impulsive noise mitigation techniques for point-to-point single-carrier communication systems impaired by bursty impulsive noise; (ii) design and performance analysis of collaborative WSN for smart grid communication by considering the RF noise model in the designing process, a particular intension is given to how the time-correlation among the noise samples can be taken into account; (iii) optimal minimum mean square error (MMSE)estimation of physical phenomenon like temperature, current, voltage, etc., typically modeled by a Gaussian source in the presence of impulsive noise. In the first part, we compare and analyze the widely used non-linear methods such as clipping, blanking, and combined clipping-blanking to mitigate the noxious effects of bursty impulsive noise for point-to-point communication systems with low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded single-carrier transmission. While, the performance of these mitigation techniques are widely investigated for multi-carrier communication systems using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission under the effect of memoryless impulsive noise, we note that OFDM is outperformed by its single-carrier counterpart when the impulses are very strong and/or they occur frequently, which likely exists in contemporary communication systems including smart grid communications. Likewise, the assumption of memoryless noise model is not valid for many communication scenarios. Moreover, we propose log-likelihood ratio (LLR)-based impulsive noise mitigation for the considered scenario. We show that the memory property of the noise can be exploited in the LLR calculation through maximum a posteriori (MAP) detection. In this context, provided simulation results highlight the superiority of the LLR-based mitigation scheme over the simple clipping/blanking schemes. The second contribution can be divided into two aspects: (i) we consider the performance analysis of a single-relay decode-and-forward (DF) cooperative relaying scheme over channels impaired by bursty impulsive noise. For this channel, the bit error rate (BER) performances of direct transmission and a DF relaying scheme using M-PSK modulation in the presence of Rayleigh fading with a MAP receiver are derived; (ii) as a continuation of single-relay collaborative WSN scheme, we propose a novel relay selection protocol for a multi-relay DF collaborative WSN taking into account the bursty impulsive noise. The proposed protocol chooses the N’th best relay considering both the channel gains and the states of the impulsive noise of the source-relay and relay-destination links. To analyze the performance of the proposed protocol, we first derive closed-form expressions for the probability density function (PDF) of the received SNR. Then, these PDFs are used to derive closed-form expressions for the BER and the outage probability. Finally, we also derive the asymptotic BER and outage expressions to quantify the diversity benefits. From the obtained results, it is seen that the proposed receivers based on the MAP detection criterion is the most suitable one for bursty impulsive noise environments as it has been designed according to the statistical behavior of the noise. Different from the aforementioned contributions, talked about the reliable detection of finite alphabets in the presence of bursty impulsive noise, in the thrid part, we investigate the optimal MMSE estimation for a scalar Gaussian source impaired by impulsive noise. In Chapter 5, the MMSE optimal Bayesian estimation for a scalar Gaussian source, in the presence of bursty impulsive noise is considered. On the other hand, in Chapter 6, we investigate the distributed estimation of a scalar Gaussian source in WSNs in the presence of Middleton class-A noise. From the obtained results we conclude that the proposed optimal MMSE estimator outperforms the linear MMSE estimator developed for Gaussian channel

Mitigation of impulsive noise for SISO and MIMO G.fast system

To address the demand for high bandwidth data transmission over telephone transmission lines, International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has recently completed the fourth generation broadband (4GBB) copper access network technology, known as G.fast. Throughout this thesis, extensively investigates the wired broadband G.fast coding system and the novel impulsive noise reduction technique has been proposed to improve the performance of wired communications network in three different scenarios: single-line Discrete Multiple Tone (DMT)- G.fast system; a multiple input multiple-output (MIMO) DMTG.fast system, and MIMO G.fast system with different crosstalk cancellation methods. For each of these scenarios, however, Impulsive Noise (IN) is considered as the main limiting factor of performance system. In order to improve the performance of such systems, which use higher order QAM constellation such as G.fast system, this thesis examines the performance of DMT G.fast system over copper channel for six different higher signal constellations of M = 32, 128, 512, 2048, 8192 and 32768 in presence of IN modelled as the Middleton Class A (MCA) noise source. In contrast to existing work, this thesis presents and derives a novel equation of Optimal Threshold (OT) to improve the IN frequency domain mitigation methods applied to the G.fast standard over copper channel with higher QAM signal constellations. The second scenario, Multi-Line Copper Wire (MLCW) G.fast is adopted utilizing the proposed MLCW Chen model and is compared to a single line G-fast system by a comparative analysis in terms of Bit-Error-Rate(BER) performance of implementation of MLCW-DMT G.fast system. The third scenario, linear and non-linear crosstalk crosstalk interference cancellation methods are applied to MLCW G.fas and compared by a comparative analysis in terms of BER performance and the complexity of implementation.University of Technology for choosing me for their PhD scholarship and The Higher Committee For Education Development in Iraq(HCED

Enhanced Air-Interfaces for Fifth Generation Mobile Broadband Communication

In broadband wireless multicarrier communication systems, intersymbol interference (ISI) and intercarrier interference (ICI) should be reduced. In orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), the cyclic prefix (CP) guarantees to reduce the ISI interference. However, the CP reduces spectral and power efficiency. In this thesis, iterative interference cancellation (IIC) with iterative decoding is used to reduce ISI and ICI from the received signal in multicarrier modulation (MCM) systems. Alternative schemes as well as OFDM with insufficient CP are considered; filter bank multicarrier (FBMC/Offset QAM) and discrete wavelet transform based multicarrier modulation (DWT-MCM). IIC is applied in these different schemes. The required components are calculated from either the hard decision of the demapper output or the estimated decoded signal. These components are used to improve the received signal. Channel estimation and data detection are very important parts of the receiver design of the wireless communication systems. Iterative channel estimation using Wiener filter channel estimation with known pilots and IIC is used to estimate and improve data detection. Scattered and interference approximation method (IAM) preamble pilot are using to calculate the estimated values of the channel coefficients. The estimated soft decoded symbols with pilot are used to reduce the ICI and ISI and improve the channel estimation. The combination of Multi-Input Multi-Output MIMO and OFDM enhances the air-interface for the wireless communication system. In a MIMO-MCM scheme, IIC and MIMO-IIC-based successive interference cancellation (SIC) are proposed to reduce the ICI/ISI and cross interference to a given antenna from the signal transmitted from the target and the other antenna respectively. The number of iterations required can be calculated by analysing the convergence of the IIC with the help of EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts. A new EXIT approach is proposed to provide a means to define performance for a given outage probability on quasi-static channels