Indoor Power-Line Communications Channel Characterization up to 100 MHz—Part II: Time-Frequency Analysis

Abstract

Estimations of coherence bandwidth and time-delay parameters from wideband channel sounding measurements made in the 30 kHz-100 MHz band in several indoor environments are described in and taken back in this paper. Powerline communications (PLC) modems rather see a channel which starts almost from 2 MHz . A comparison between coherence bandwidth and time-delay parameters estimated in both frequency bands 30 kHz-100 MHz and 2 MHz-100 MHz is elaborated in this paper. Results are intended for applications in high-capacity indoor power-line networks. The investigation is aimed to show that the PLC channel studies in a band starting from a frequency lower than 2 MHz distorts the real values that an implementer should take, as the PLC modem see only the frequencies from 2 MHz. The coherence bandwidth and the time delay parameters are estimated from measurements of the complex transfer functions of the PLC channels. For the 30 kHz-100 MHz frequency band, the 90 th percentile of the estimated coherence bandwidth at 0.9 correlation level stay above 65.5 kHz and below 691.5 kHz. It was observed to have a minimum value of 32.5 kHz. The maximum excess delay spread results show that 80% of the channels exhibit values between 0.6 s and 6.45 s. And a mean rms delay spread of 0.413 s is obtained. The passage to the 2 MHz-100 MHz frequency band induced an increase of the coherence bandwidth, whose min value is brought back to 43.5 kHz, and an important reduction of the time delay parameters: The min, max, mean, and standard deviation values of the maximum excess delay are almost divided by 2. For the twice frequency bands, this paper studies, also, the variability of the coherence bandwidth and time-delay spread parameters with the channel class , and thus with the location of the receiver with respect to the transmitter, and finally relates the rms delay spread to the coherence bandwidth.