Power Line Communication Networks Research Articles

Simulation of Achievable Data Rates of Broadband Power Line Communication for Smart Metering

Building real Smart Metering and Smart Grid networks is very expensive and time-consuming and also it is impossible to install different technologies in the same environment only for comparison. Therefore, simulation and experimental pilot measurements are an easy, economical, and time-affordable solution for a first comparison and evaluation of different technologies and solutions. The local area networks (LAN) are the core of Smart Metering and Smart Grid networks. The two predominant technologies are mostly sufficient for LAN networks, Power Line Communication (PLC), and radio frequency (RF) solutions. For PLC it is hard to allow prediction of the behaviour. Performance assessment for point-to-point connection is easy, but for complex PLC networks with repeaters it is quite expensive. Therefore, a simulation is an easy, fast, and cheap solution for understanding the grid configuration, influence of particular topological components, and performance possibilities. Simulation results can, thus, provide material for the design of a telecommunication infrastructure for Smart Metering. This paper presents results of such a simulation study. It is based on realistic PLC channel model implementation in Network Simulator 3, our modification and extension of this implementation for our use case scenario. It uses Shannon’s formula to calculate theoretical maximum channel capacity. In particular, it provides channel capacity and achievable distances of broadband PLC (BB-PLC). In this article we also exploit our novel idea of simple performance assessment of broadband PLC communication via simulation. It is supposed to be used to understand, evaluate, and test the grid configuration before deployment.

Analog Full-Duplex Amplify-and-Forward Relay for Power Line Communication Networks

Signal relays in power line communication networks are usually implemented using the decode-and-forward protocol, which requires complex relays. In this letter, we propose a real-time amplify-and-forward relay that is mainly based on an analog full-duplex architecture. The speed of analog circuits enables the amplification of the incoming signal without introducing a significant communication delay. Our system-level analysis explains the optimization of the relay design and, based on a measured channel database, shows what increase in communication rate can be achieved by using the proposed solution.

A Novel Precoding and Impulsive Noise Mitigation Scheme for MIMO Power Line Communication Systems

Power line communications (PLCs) enable new and flexible networking functions in smart grids. However, due to the high attenuation and interference, it is a great challenge for PLC to achieve reliable and high data rate transmissions. Thus, we propose a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) architecture to improve the reliability and data rate for PLC networks. In viewing the data rate requirements of in-home PLC network systems, we develop a precoding scheme to maximize the system throughput. In harmonizing to the proposed precoding scheme, the closed-form of the sum data rate of the PLC-MIMO channel is derived. To improve the communication reliability, we propose a partial transmission sequence (PTS) based algorithm to mitigate the noise in PLC channels. The closed-form of the symbol error rate (SER) is derived according to the probability density function of the impulsive noise in PLC channels. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed precoding scheme achieves a better throughput when compared to the conventional precoding schemes. Furthermore, the PTS-based noise mitigation algorithm significantly improves the SER performance of PLC links.

Statistical Learning for Service Quality Estimation in Broadband PLC AMI

In this paper, we propose a method to estimate communication performance for the advanced metering infrastructure that employs the power line communication (PLC) technology. Using bit-per-symbol signals from the PLC network management system, we estimate a PLC model quality in terms of packet success rate based on statistical learning. We also verify the accuracy of the estimations by comparing them with measured communication test results at test sites. Finally, from the packet success rate estimate, the qualities of services, such as meter readings and time-of-use pricing data downloading under several metering protocol sequences, are investigated through a mathematical analysis, and numerical results are provided.

Design of Hybrid Wireless and Power Line Sensor Networks With Dual-Interface Relay in IoT

The hybrid wireless and power line communication (HWPLC) networks address the problem that mobile wireless sensors and power line communication (PLC) sensors cannot communicate with each other within an Internet of Things (IoT) network. In this paper, we design a relay equipped with a dual wireless and PLC interface, which connects both the PLC and wireless sensors into an IoT network. Furthermore, the dual-interface relay forwards messages by adaptively selecting a interface according to the channel state. A general mathematical probability model of the dual-interface relaying system is presented. The probability density function of the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is developed, which is based on explicit closed-form expressions derived from the statistics character of the PLC and wireless channel. Furthermore, the average capacity, bit-error rate (BER) expressions, and the outage probability formulas are derived. Numerical results show that the HPLWC relaying system with the dual-interface can significantly improve the performance of capacity, BER, and outage probability by adaptively selecting the interface with the optimal received SNR.

A Measurement Based Study to Assess Power Line Communication Network Throughput Performance

Power line communications (PLC) is a known low cost technology which is easily installed and extended to the various connections especially to areas with poor wireless coverage. Unfortunately, designers and users experience technical problems that arise from the difficulty of operating on a complex time varying medium and that limits the expected high throughput. Therefore, testing and understanding network dynamics of PLC systems before usage is a necessity. This paper presents the findings obtained from the experiments carried out in order to verify the throughput performance of PLC systems. Experimental measurements are realized in different testbeds, under different times and conditions, in order to achieve an idea of the practical PLC performance. Data obtained from the measurements have been stored and the throughput is analyzed by the help of software. Following, using distribution fitting methods, it is shown that the PLC throughput may be modeled by the extreme value distribution. Furthermore, adding a basic noise to the network, simply by lamps, results with a degraded performance. The noise changes the parameters of the derived distributions; a decrease in expected value and an increase in standard deviation are observed.

Broadband Power Line Communication: The Channel and Noise Analysis for A Power Line Network

The scope for broadband powerline Communication is considered as a retrofit technology for wide geographical coverage wherever the human habitation exists. So during the last decade, it has drawn an enormous quantity of research work for improving communication performance and this system being standardized all over the world. The broadband power line Communication channel modelling is essential in the design of a reliable communications system. An analysis on the proposed channel model is conducted in this paper; also the paper studied the noises in Broadband powerline Communication network and its mathematical model. The channel Transfer function and Error Performance of Proposed powerline communication System noise is evaluated with various digital modulation techniques Bit error rate (BER) and signal to noise ratio (SNR) curve by using simulation software. The results indicated that the noise analysis is effective for modelling the power line communication channel. Also, we have presented the various studies on the channel performance based on Orthogonal frequency-division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems for an efficient design of a Broadband Powerline Communication (BPLC) system.

Resource Allocation for Relay-Based OFDMA Power Line Communication System

In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation for multi-user orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) power line communication (PLC) systems, which satisfy both the total average transmit power constrained by PLC networks and the required interference limitations. First, we propose an optimal resource allocation scheme, with respect to joint consideration of the subcarrier and power constraint to maximize the throughput of the PLC system. Then, we divide the intractable problem into two individual subproblems to decrease the computational burden, which can avoid proceeding the mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. The proposed resource allocation scheme can ensure the optimality and efficiency of the system with rigorous proofs. The simulation results show that our proposed resource allocation scheme for the PLC system outperforms other algorithms, and is efficient with acceptable complexity.

The Effect of Cellular Network-Based Communication Delays in an EV Aggregator’s Domain on Frequency Regulation Service

Provision of frequency regulation service with a large number of electric vehicles (EVs) through EV aggregators requires to exchange regulation related messages through communication infrastructures in EV aggregators’ domain. Communication delays in the aggregators’ domain may significantly affect regulation performance. We investigate the effect of communication delays in an EV aggregator’s domain on the regulation performance. We present an underlying communication network for the EV aggregator controlling a group of EVs at a parking lot. The underlying communication network consists of two separate subnetworks: 1) a power line communication network between a pair of EV and EV supply equipment (EVSE) and 2) an LTE network between one EV aggregator and a group of EVSEs. In order to evaluate the delay effect on the regulation performance, we propose a co-simulation platform which is composed of an LTE network model and a load frequency control model. For the LTE network, we analyze the potential sources of delays and identify the repeated service request and release procedures as a critical delay source. We implement the identified repeated procedure by using network simulator-3 and evaluate the delay performance of frequency regulation service. We evaluate the effect of the communication delay in the EV aggregator’s domain on regulation performance.

Adaptive Cooperative Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access-Based Power Line Communication

This paper proposes an adaptive cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme for power line communication (PLC) networks, in which the source superimposes the data symbols to two users. Specifically, the source communicates with the far-user with the assistance of relay. Meanwhile, depending on negligible 1-bit feedback, the near-user is reached through an adaptive way which switches between a direct and a cooperative data transmission mode, resulting in an enhancement of the system throughput and a more reliable data reception at the near-user. For this setting, we then analyze the system throughput over the log-normal distributed channel fading with the impulsive noise and investigate the impact of key system parameters. The simulation results validate the theoretical analysis and show that our scheme can obtain a better throughput performance with lower power consumption and reduce the electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) issues for PLC networks more efficiently than the time division multiple access (TDMA) and traditional cooperative NOMA (TCN) schemes.

Modelling and comparison for low‐voltage broadband power line noise using LS‐SVM and wavelet neural networks

This study is to construct the autoregressive models for the low-voltage broadband power line communication (PLC) channel noise by two machine learning algorithms, namely the least square support vector machine (LS-SVM) and wavelet neural networks. The main work is to compare the two classical machine learning algorithms and also compare them with the traditional Markovian–Gaussian method. To verify their availability and ability to adapt to the time-variant PLC channels, noise measurements for low-voltage PLC channels in indoor and outdoor scenarios are carried out. The accuracy and efficiency of the two models are studied and compared based on a large amount of measurement data. The results show that both of the noise models can simulate and adapt to the time-variant low-voltage broadband PLC channels very well. The LS-SVM model is found to have shorter simulation time and higher accuracy. Moreover, the proposed noise models are also compared with the traditional Markovian–Gaussian model. The results show that both the proposed noise models exhibit higher accuracy and lower complexity, especially that the LS-SVM is more appropriate to be applied as a noise generator in PLC link and network level simulations instead of the current Markovian–Gaussian model.

Comparative analysis of the signal power density in a real PLC channel and a simulation-based NS-3 environment

Communication organization over the power lines is complicated by a row of negative factors. One of the main disadvantages of the Power Line Communication (PLC) technology is the existence of various types of noise in the communication channel, which impedes transmission of a signal. As a result, there is a need to minimize the influence of noise on a signal. It is necessary to make a dynamic choice of frequencies suitable for data transmission in the case when the noise minimization is impossible. It is expedient to investigate the spectral power density of a signal during data transmission over the PLC channel to determine the least noisy frequencies. In this article, the investigation of the spectral power density of a PLC channel is described. The research is conducted by simulation modelling in the NS-3 environment and experimentation in a real-world block of flats. The goal of the research is to evaluate conformance of an NS-3 model to a real-world PLC network. During the analysis of the experimental results and simulation modelling results, there was drawn a conclusion that the spectral power density distribution of a signal and noise in the model differs from the real-world PLC channel.

Performance Analysis of an Opportunistic Relaying Power Line Communication Systems

Powerline communication (PLC) is an attractive approach to providing information transfer services for future smart grids. However, due to high attenuation and interference, it is a great challenge to achieve reliable transmissions over PLC channels. In this letter, we propose an opportunistic decode-and-forward-based multiple-relaying (ODFR) scheme to enhance the performance of PLC networks, where the optimal relay is selected dynamically for data forwarding. Specifically, we first formulate the cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) of the received signal-to-noise ratio by exploiting statistical properties of the PLC channels. Then, drawing upon this derived CDF, we further develop the closed-form expressions of outage probability and approximate capacity for the proposed ODFR scheme. Simulations validate the consistency of our analytical results with Monte Carlo simulations.

Application-Layer Approach for Efficient Smart Meter Reading in Low-Voltage PLC Networks

This paper presents an efficient method for data acquisition and automatic meter reading (AMR) system from smart electric meters (SM) using power-line communications (PLC) networks. A PLC network uses existing electrical wiring to simultaneously carry both data and electric power. However, since the transmission medium in a PLC network is not designed for high quality data transfer, its efficiency in carrying out AMR applications is limited. The PLC network’s traffic load is significantly affected both by the routing algorithm and the polling ordering of the SM. This paper suggests two novel smart polling algorithms based on application layer approach. The proposed algorithms demonstrate efficient utilization of both proactive and reactive routing protocols for AMR applications in narrowband PLCs networks. The benefit of the proposed approach is demonstrated for the two most common protocols, the routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks and the lightweight on-demand ad hoc distance-vector routing protocol.

Energy-Per-Bit Performance Analysis of Relay-Assisted Power Line Communication Systems

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the energy efficiency performance for different relaying schemes over the non-Gaussian power line communication (PLC) channel. Specifically, amplify-and-forward (AF), decode-and-forward (DF), selective DF (SDF) and incremental DF (IDF) relaying systems are investigated. For a more realistic scenario, the power consumption profile of the PLC modems is assumed to consist of both dynamic and static power. For each system, we derive accurate analytical expressions for the outage probability and the minimum energy-per-bit performance. For the sake of comparison and completeness as well as to quantify the achievable gains, we also analyze the performance of a single-hop PLC system. Monte Carlo simulations are provided throughout this paper to validate the theoretical analysis. Results reveal that AF relaying over the non-Gaussian PLC channel does not always enhance the performance and that the IDF PLC system offers the best performance compared to all other schemes considered. It is also shown that increasing the channel variance, which is related to the PLC network branching, and impulsive noise probability can considerably deteriorate the system performance. Furthermore, when the end-to-end distance is relatively small, it is found that the single-hop PLC approach can perform better than AF relaying.

Efficient Access Control for Broadband Power Line Communications in Home Area Networks

In this paper, we address the problem of improving the medium access control (MAC) layer efficiency in indoor broadband power line communication networks. Several overheads in the MAC layer, like random back-offs and collision recovery, degrade the MAC efficiency. To reduce these overheads, we apply in-band full-duplexing (IBFD), which enables medium-aware transmission at all the network nodes. Specifically, we propose two new schemes called contention-free pre-sensing and mutual preamble detection to minimize the time spent during contentions and collisions. Considering the non-idealities of IBFD, we analytically show the feasibility of our solutions. We further design a comprehensive simulation model with multiple priority data frames and Poisson network traffic arrival to emulate a real in-home network traffic. We then present numerical results for both the classical saturated network model and the comprehensive traffic model, to show through OMNeT++ simulations that our presented solutions achieve over 95% of the optimum MAC efficiency that can only be attained in the idealized case of no contentions or collisions.

Geo-Routing Algorithms and Protocols for Power Line Communications in Smart Grids

Making electric power grids smart is invariably linked to the implementation of an advanced communication infrastructure that is able to transport sensing, control and automation information timely, reliably and efficiently. Reusing the power line themselves to realize (part of) this infrastructure is an obvious choice that has a long and successful track record with power utilities. In this paper, we propose to make use of the fact that the nodes of a power line communications (PLCs) network are stationary to deliver messages fast and energy efficiently through routes consisting of a series of communication links. In particular, we exploit location information of PLC nodes to route a message along a favorable path. Such geographic or geo-routing is particularly apt for PLC networks with time-varying link qualities, where optimal routes will change with time. We present routing algorithms and protocols for unicast, broadcast, and multicast transmission that use network topology knowledge to determine the message path taking energy and delay constraints into account. We focus on the distribution domain of the power grid and propose decentralized solutions that use of information about the communication neighborhood of a node, which is acquired through proper signaling in the grid.

Modelling for TDMA under an AFR scheme over HomePlug AV (HPAV)

Background/Objectives: HPAV uses Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) for the voice and video package transmission, in order to offer properQoS levels. The main goal of this paper is to propose a model that allows assessing the performance of a Power Line Communication network (PLC) under TDMA, during the transmission of multimedia packages, using a AFR package (Aggregation with Fragment Retransmission). Methods/Statistic Analysis: In this paper, the throughput saturation concept for a finite Number of stations. For that reason, it will be assumed that the package size is fixed of bits to a rate of Mbps. In order to analyze the performance of the network supported in TDMA, a model is proposed; such model is based on a Round Robin Scheduler (RR) scheme, according to the MAC structure hybrid for HPAV. Subject Relevance: AFR is a scheme that was proposed to reach a high efficiency rate in the layer of Media Access Control (MAC) and that, to date, has only been considered in Wireless networks supported in 802.11n. Additionally, up to date, no models to assess the performance over TDMA applied to HPVA in different bibliographic sources have been found. Results: Based on the obtained results, it was possible to observe that the model permits to assess the probability of loss packages, the efficiency MAC over TDMA, the throughput and the levels of delay on a PLC network during a transmission of video and voice under a AFR scheme, according to the number of stations, the size of the containment window and the available bandwidth in the channel. Application/Improvements: The model proposed can be considered as a tool in future research papers, for the transmission of Voice and video over HPVA, to assess aspects related to QoS. Keywords: Home Plug, Powerline, Performance, Throughput, AFR, CSMA/CA

Design and Performance Analysis of Power Line Communication Networks Under Impulsive Noise in Smart Home

Power line communication (PLC) is an attractive approach to provide information transfer services for the smart home. The PLC network inherently suffers from the severe channel fading and impulsive noise. According to the mode of impulsive and the impulsive occurrence, the PLC channel can be modeled as the channel with memory. We compute the achievable rate by employing the Markov process with a finite number of states based on the dependence among the impulsive occurrence numbers in different time slots. Furthermore, the cumulative distribution function (CDF) for the received signal-to-noise ratio is derived with the statistical characteristics of the PLC channel. This helps in obtaining the ergodic capacity and outage probability for the PLC channels. We finally present the simulation results to verify the analytical results.

Comparison of Differential-Mode and Mixed-Mode Conducted Emission for Household Appliances in Power-Line Communication System

Electromagnetic interference (EMI) from the low-voltage power-line network has been a major concern for the power-line communications (PLC) technology. The conventional EMI measurement is based on the mixed mode, including common mode, and differential mode (DM). However, the dominant transmission mode of PLC is DM. Therefore, for electromagnetic compatibility designing purposes, knowledge of the DM noise of the household appliances in the frequency range of 150 kHz to 30 MHz is essential to provide insight of conducted disturbance on the low-voltage power-line network. In this paper, a simple and useful method of DM conducted emission (DMCE) measurement using a PLC coupler is proposed and it offers a suitable interface and a convenient way for the household appliance to obtain the DMCE with the existing equipment. The obtained results compare the levels of DMCE and mixed-mode conducted emission (MMCE) from different kind of household appliance. It shows that even when MMCE meets the current limits in standard CISPR 14, DMCE may still exceed these limits. In order to suppress EMI on the PLC network, the limits and measurement methods of DMCE for the household appliance should be taken into account in the future.