Performance Comparisons of Broadband Power Line Communication Technologies

Young Mo Chung

doi:10.3390/app10093306

Abstract

Broadband power line communication (PLC) is used as a communication technique for advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) in Korea. High-speed (HS) PLC specified in ISO/IEC12139-1 and HomePlug Green PHY (HPGP) are deployed for remote metering. Recently, internet of things (IoT) PLC has been proposed for reliable communications on harsh power line channels. In this paper, the physical layer performance of IoT PLC, HPGP, and HS PLC is evaluated and compared. Three aspects of the performance are evaluated: the bit rate, power spectrum, and bit error rate (BER). An expression for the bit rate for IoT PLC and HPGP is derived while taking the padding bits and number of tones in use into consideration. The power spectrum is obtained through computer simulations. For the BER performance comparisons, the upper bound of the BER for each PLC standard is evaluated through computer simulations.

Highlights

In a smart grid, the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is responsible for collecting data from consumer utilities and giving commands to them
Since our goal is to evaluate the upper limit of the bit error rate (BER) performance, we assume a perfect channel and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)
The extrinsic information is provided to the other soft-input soft-output (SISO) decoder as an updated a priori likelihood ratio (LLR)

Summary

Introduction

The advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is responsible for collecting data from consumer utilities and giving commands to them. AMI consists of smart meters, communication networks, and data managing systems [1,2]. PLC technologies can be classified into narrowband and broadband PLC according to the frequency bandwidth used. Narrowband PLC generally provides low data rates due to the narrow bandwidth of 3–500 kHz. To overcome the limitations of low rates and accommodate various service demands for utilities, powerline intelligent metering evolution (PRIME) and G3-PLC based on the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing technology were introduced [5]. To overcome the limitations of low rates and accommodate various service demands for utilities, powerline intelligent metering evolution (PRIME) and G3-PLC based on the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing technology were introduced [5] These narrowband PLC technologies have been deployed for communication methods for AMI in European countries [5]. The HomePlug Powerline Alliance has developed the HomePlug Green PHY (HPGP) standard for broadband PLC technology [7]

Objectives

Results

Conclusion