POWER LINES AS LOCAL AREA NETWORKS FOR MEASURING AND CONTROL SIGNAL TRANSMISSION

Electrical power distribution networks represent the most attractive medium for digital communication purposes due to an ever increasing demand for environmental management of buildings, security monitoring, office automation or remote control of customer appliances and remote meter reading. Power lines are, however, heavily stressed with interference from various sources. Both interference and attenuation are time-variant and frequency-selective in an arbitrary way. The prospective user has to overcome the impairments with a severely restricted level of transmission power, e.g. 5 mW in Germany; the transmission bandwidth, however, exceeds 100 kHz. Obviously simple and inexpensive modulation schemes for digital data transmission such as amplitude shift keying (ASK) or frequency shift keying (FSK) are ruled out. A significant success of band-spreading techniques has been demonstrated by several field trials and extended measurements at different power line networks. Application of spread spectrum techniques generally involves high effort; this is especially true for frequency hopping, which proved advantageous in practical applications. Exploiting the possibilities of modern microelectronics, including design and production of ASICs, recently led to a break-through. A five-year research project based on frequency hopping spread spectrum signaling opened up power lines as local area networks e.g. for office automation or remote meter reading. Transmitter and receiver prototypes were constructed for evaluation of the proposed ideas at various power line networks. Transmitters are based on standard microcontrollers, whereas an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) with a complexity of about ·5000 gates is the heart of the receiver. Due to completely digital signal processing. the prototypes are useful as a base for series production

Software Defined Channel Sounder for Power Line Communications

Most power line channel sounders are based on expensive lab instruments. This work presents an alternative based on software defined radio platforms. These can be later also employed as communication modems, decreasing costs and deployment times. We implemented and evaluated two channel sounding techniques: frequency hopping and sliding correlator. The results suggest that frequency hopping might be a better candidate for power line channels due to the expected low signal-to-noise ratio

Reports on industrial information technology. Vol. 12

The 12th volume of Reports on Industrial Information Technology presents some selected results of research achieved at the Institute of Industrial Information Technology during the last two years. These results have contributed to many cooperative projects with partners from academia and industry and cover current research interests including signal and image processing, pattern recognition, distributed systems, powerline communications, automotive applications, and robotics

Noise Characterization and Emulation for Low-Voltage Power Line Channels between 150 kHz and 10 MHz

Characterization and emulation of power line noise have attracted interest since long, in both narrowband and broadband applications. Based on existing models, this paper presents a systematic approach to extract and parameterize each subtype of low-voltage (LV) power line noise between 150 kHz and 10 MHz. Based on the characterization, a FPGA-based emulator is proposed to emulate power line noise scenarios flexibly. A LV power line noise measuring platform is also presented with sample measurements and their emulation

Associate Editors

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