Broadband power-line noise modeling and compensation

Abstract

Broadband power-line communication (BPLC) has become more popular in the Smart Grid context as it allows broadband access, media sharing, automated meter reading etc. However, it still remains as a challenging task to characterize and compensate for the impairments of the power-line networks for high-speed communications. In the scope of the thesis study, multi-path fading and path loss of the powerline channel are studied and a unit length attenuation profile (ULAP) is derived from measurements as part of the channel characterization. Using ULAP and the other channel parameters, a power-line channel simulator is developed. Correctness of the simulation is verified by measurement. Using the PLC channel simulations, statistics of the channel parameters are also studied. During the course of the thesis work, both broadband noise and home appliance noise are studied and characterized. Background noise is analyzed in frequency domain and Generalized Gaussian distribution (GGD) is proposed for modeling the noise amplitude distribution of each individual frequency. The proposed model is verified by measurements in the Kullback-Leibler sense of distribution mismatch penalty. Using the proposed noise model, a novel Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based receiver is proposed. It is shown that the performance of the proposed receiver utilizing the parameters of the proposed noise model reveals promising results.