Characterization Of Power Lines Research Articles

Measurement and Characterization of Power Lines of Aircraft Flight Test Instrumentation

This paper presents a statistical characterization of power lines used by the flight test instrumentation of a corporate jet as a medium for data communication purposes. We quantify the main parameters that drive the design of power line communication technologies at the physical layer. We show that the limit of $-$ 83.01 dBm/Hz on the power spectral density (1.7–86 MHz), imposed by the standard RTCA/DO160, results in data rates as high as 90 Mb/s.

Innovative model for time-varying power line communication channel response evaluation

This work presents a channel model for the broadband characterization of power lines in presence of time variation of the loads. The model is characterized by taking into account both measured and geometrical channel characteristics and can easily be used to take into account also the presence of noise. The channel is described by a two-port equivalent described by a scattering matrix determined from a wavelet-based expansion of the input and output quantities. Upper and lower bounds for the response of the channel in presence of time-varying loads are determined in a fast and efficient way avoiding time consuming Monte Carlo simulations. The bounds determination allows the estimate of noteworthy quantities for the tuning of currently used modulation schemes for power lines communications such as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing.

Channel order and RMS delay spread estimation with application to AC power line communications

AC power lines have been considered as a convenient and low-cost medium for intra-building automation systems. In this paper, we investigate the problem of estimating the channel order and root mean squared (RMS) delay spread associated with the power lines, which are channel parameters that provide important information for determining the data transmission rate and designing appropriate equalization techniques for power lines communications (PLC). We start by showing that the key to the RMS delay spread estimation problem is the determination of the channel order, i.e., the effective duration of the channel impulse response. We next discuss various ways to estimate the impulse response length from a noise-corrupted channel estimate. In particular, four different methods, namely a signal energy estimation (SEE) technique, a generalized Akaike information criterion (GAIC) based test, a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT), and a modified GLRT, are derived for determining the effective length of a signal contaminated by noise. These methods are compared with one another using both simulated and experimentally measured power line data. The experimental data was collected for power line characterization in frequencies between 1 and 60 MHz.

Wide band AC power line characterization

This paper presents data characterizing the household AC power line in the 1-60 MHz band. Two types of measurements were performed: transmission and noise sampling. The transmission measurements were done by using the impulse channel sounding method, so both the line attenuation and the delay spread were obtained. The noise measurements include: power line background noise, appliance noise, and noise sampled over a 24 hour period. Statistical characteristics of the delay spread, frequency response and noise can be extracted from the data and used in the design of AC power line based communications systems.