2013 Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Power Line Communications and Its Applications (ISPLC)

Cyclic Spectral Analysis of Power Line Noise in the 3-200 kHz Band

Karl Nieman (1), Jing Lin (1), Marcel Nassar (1), Khurram Waheed (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
karl.nieman@utexas.edu - jing.lin08@gmail.com - mnassar@utexas.edu - bevans@ece.utexas.edu

(2) Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., Austin, TX.
khurram.waheed@freescale.com

Paper Draft - Slides - Measured Data and Matlab Code

Smart Grid Communications Research at UT Austin

Received the Best Paper Award at IEEE ISPLC 2013

Abstract

Narrowband OFDM Power Line Communication (NB-OFDM PLC) systems are a key component of current and future smart grids. NB-OFDM PLC systems enable nextgeneration smart metering, distributed control, and monitoring applications over existing power delivery infrastructure. It has been shown that the performance of these systems is severely limited by impulsive, non-Gaussian additive noise. A substantial component of this noise has time-periodic statistics (i.e. it is cyclostationary) synchronous to the AC mains cycle. In this work, we analyze the cyclic structure of power line noise observed in a G3 PLC system operating in the CENELEC 3-148.5 kHz band. Our contributions include:
  1. the characterization of noise measurements in several urban usage environments
  2. the development of a cyclic bit loading method for G3
  3. the quantification of its throughput gains over measured noise.
Through this analysis, we confirm strong cyclostationarity in power lines and identify several sources of the cyclic noise.

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Last Updated 01/03/14.