IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 29, no. 5, pp. 116-127, Sep. 2012.

Local Utility Powerline Communications in the 3-500 kHz Band: Channel Impairments, Noise, and Standards

Marcel Nassar (1), Jing Lin (1), Yousof Mortazavi (1), Anand Dabak (2), Il Han Kim (2) and Brian L. Evans (1)

(1) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Wireless Networking and Communications Group, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712 USA
nassar.marcel@mail.utexas.edu - jing.lin08@gmail.com - ymortazavi@mail.utexas.edu - bevans@ece.utexas.edu

(2) Texas Instruments, Dallas, TX USA.

Paper Draft

Smart Grid Communications Research at UT Austin

Abstract

Future Smart Grid systems will intelligently monitor and control energy flows in order to improve the efficiency and reliability of power delivery. This monitoring and control requires low-delay, highly reliable communication between customers, local utilities and regional utilities. A vital part of future Smart Grids is the two-way communication links between smart meters at the customer sites and a (decentralized) command and control center operated by the local utility. To enable these two-way communication links, narrowband powerline communication (PLC) systems operating in the 3-500 kHz band are attractive because they can be deployed over existing outdoor power lines. Power lines, however, have traditionally been designed for one-directional power delivery and remain hostile environments for communication signal propagation. In this article, we review signal processing approaches to model channel impairments and impulsive noise and mitigate their effects in narrowband PLC systems. We examine ways to improve the communication performance based on current and emerging standards.

Questions

How do I find the coefficients of the filters in the three-channel filter bank model for cyclostationary PLC noise generation?

We use the FFT spectrum for each independent region of the noise. As a result, we didn't actually fit the spectrum to a filter which could be done easily though spectral estimation techniques.

The FFT spectrum for each region is given in the following IEEE contribution:

A. Dabak, B. Varadrajan, I. H. Kim, M. Nassar, and G. Gregg, Appendix for noise channel modeling for IEEE P1901.2, IEEE P1901.2 Standard, June 2011, doc: 2wg-11-0134-05-PHM5.

One could either use the data in the above document and fit it to lower order filter; or, one can use the figures in our paper to design your own simple filter that captures the primary properties of the noise spectrum.


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Last Updated 09/15/14.