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

A general theory of phase noise in electrical oscillators

A general model is introduced which is capable of making accurate, quantitative predictions about the phase noise of different types of electrical oscillators by acknowledging the true periodically time-varying nature of all oscillators. This new approach also elucidates several previously unknown design criteria for reducing close-in phase noise by identifying the mechanisms by which intrinsic device noise and external noise sources contribute to the total phase noise. In particular, it explains the details of how 1/f noise in a device upconverts into close-in phase noise and identifies methods to suppress this upconversion. The theory also naturally accommodates cyclostationary noise sources, leading to additional important design insights. The model reduces to previously available phase noise models as special cases. Excellent agreement among theory, simulations, and measurements is observed

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

LeakyOhm: Secret Bits Extraction using Impedance Analysis

The threats of physical side-channel attacks and their countermeasures have been widely researched. Most physical side-channel attacks rely on the unavoidable influence of computation or storage on current consumption or voltage drop on a chip. Such data-dependent influence can be exploited by, for instance, power or electromagnetic analysis. In this work, we introduce a novel non-invasive physical side-channel attack, which exploits the data-dependent changes in the impedance of the chip. Our attack relies on the fact that the temporarily stored contents in registers alter the physical characteristics of the circuit, which results in changes in the die's impedance. To sense such impedance variations, we deploy a well-known RF/microwave method called scattering parameter analysis, in which we inject sine wave signals with high frequencies into the system's power distribution network (PDN) and measure the echo of the signals. We demonstrate that according to the content bits and physical location of a register, the reflected signal is modulated differently at various frequency points enabling the simultaneous and independent probing of individual registers. Such side-channel leakage challenges the $t$-probing security model assumption used in masking, which is a prominent side-channel countermeasure. To validate our claims, we mount non-profiled and profiled impedance analysis attacks on hardware implementations of unprotected and high-order masked AES. We show that in the case of the profiled attack, only a single trace is required to recover the secret key. Finally, we discuss how a specific class of hiding countermeasures might be effective against impedance leakage

Batteries and Supercapacitors Aging

Electrochemical energy storage is a key element of systems in a wide range of sectors, such as electro-mobility, portable devices, and renewable energy. The energy storage systems (ESSs) considered here are batteries, supercapacitors, and hybrid components such as lithium-ion capacitors. The durability of ESSs determines the total cost of ownership, the global impacts (lifecycle) on a large portion of these applications and, thus, their viability. Understanding ESS aging is a key to optimizing their design and usability in terms of their intended applications. Knowledge of ESS aging is also essential to improve their dependability (reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety). This Special Issue includes 12 research papers and 1 review article focusing on battery, supercapacitor, and hybrid capacitor aging

Power line communications systems

The purpose of this project is to determine the performance of a Power line communication connection by measuring its propagation characteristics. For power line communication to become efficient, a model of their behaviour at frequencies from 0 to 30 MHz is required. The attenuation and phase response are of particular interest. In this project, indoor cables within a building were utilized. A three core indoor cable is modeled as a two wire lumped-element model with distributed parameters. These parameters are capacitance, inductance, conductance and resistance.The predicted results, generated by MATLAB software closely matched those obtained by the measurements carried out on the 10m flat cable. The model and its results will allow communication designers to determine the optimal communication scheme for this power line channel.However, more investigation is required to determine noise characteristics and impedance mismatch in the power line network before it can be completely modeled