Abstract
The advent of power line communication (PLC) for smart grids, vehicular communications, and data network access, has recently gained ample interest among the researchers and industries. Couplers - devices used to inject data communication signals into (Alternating Current or Direct Current) power lines are very important components of a PLC system. There is, however, an obvious gap in literature for a detailed review of existing PLC couplers. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of couplers, which are required in narrowband and broadband PLC transceivers. We provide, also, a novel classification of PLC couplers based on the type of physical coupling, voltage levels, frequency bandwidth, propagation mode, and number of connections. Prevailing issues that protract the design of couplers and consequently subtended the invention of different types of couplers are clearly described. This survey will guide researchers, and designers alike, into a quicker resourcing when studying coupling in narrowband and broadband PLC systems.
Highlights
The use of power cables for data communication purposes, known as Power Line Communication (PLC), dated back to the early 1910s when Major George Squier of US Army demonstrated the transmission of analog voice signals over a pair of power cables to support the operation of distribution power systems by electric utilities
The review showed that the introduction of couplers to connect PLC transceivers to electric power circuits could be used to minimize both signal distortion and insertion loss to improve PLC systems performance
We isolated the key issues related to the design of a PLC coupler, such as the printed circuit board (PCB) design, insertion and return loss, galvanic isolation, impedance matching, filtering and protection
Summary
The use of power cables for data communication purposes, known as Power Line Communication (PLC), dated back to the early 1910s when Major George Squier of US Army demonstrated the transmission of analog voice signals (multiple telephony channels) over a pair of power cables to support the operation of distribution power systems by electric utilities. At that time, this type of analog data transmission was called wired wireless [1].
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