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I. INTRODUCTION
Abstract With the advent of technology, human
dependency on electricity and communication has grown
beyond leaps and bounds. As a matter of fact, Power line
communication has been of remarkable interest in the past few
years due to the availability of power lines in every home. In
previous fields, narrowband Power Line Communications has
been employed for potential indoor as well as outdoor
applications. However, with the spread of broadband
technologies, the need to study broadband Power Line
Communications in indoor use is essential. Therefore, this
paper aims at modelling the broadband Power line
communications channel based on indoor applications as well
as applying Multiple Input Multiple Output coding technique
with its channel estimation to the system to achieve better
performance. The main objectives were to model the Power
Line communications channel and a performance analysis of
the Power line communications system is done under Rayleigh
Fading distribution along with its noise modelling. Assuming
BPSK modulation scheme, the system performance with
varying load impedances is compared. After applying MIMO
codes, performance comparison is analyzed with varying
number of transmit and receive antennas as well as code rates.
The results have shown that narrowband scenario has a better
performance than broadband scenario due to its lower
attenuation. Also, it has been seen that load impedances greatly
affect the BER performance and these are dependent on the
weighting factors. Similarly, the results have proved that PLC
channel follow a Rayleigh Fading distribution. Compared to
the SISO model, the 2x2 MIMO shows an improvement of 5.8
dB. With increasing receive antennas, the system performs
better. Comparison of the code rates has demonstrated that the
rate coded system achieves greater performance than the
rate coded system. These analyzed performances have shown
that MIMO coding scheme can be implemented in broadband
PLC channel for indoor applications.
= ZA and Z12 = ZC, thus reflection will occur only along the
segment BD and Zl3 ZD.
13 21
13 + 21
;
=
21 =
13
11 ||12
+ 13
= 1 +
= 1 +
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
H (f) = =1 . (, ). 2
(6)
(7)
0
Where, is the dielectric constant of the insulating
material.
(8)
Where,
is the scale factor of the distribution.
PLC channel can be said to be frequency-selective. This
would mean that its channel spectral response contains fades
due to the numerous reflections causing elimination of
certain frequencies at the receiver or deep nulls due to
destructive interference [12].
Another important factor of Rayleigh fading channel is
the Doppler shift which is caused by motion of objects.
However, in the case of a PLC channel which is a wired
medium, there will no Doppler effect since there is no
movement of any object. Therefore, there will no Rayleigh
fading due to Doppler Effect but only due to multipath
propagation.
= + =
+
2
(10)
C. PLC noise
In [13], it states that noise is one important feature which
influences the digital communications over power line
networks apart from signal distortion due to cable losses and
multipath propagation cited previously. Also, unlike other
communication channels, power line noise does not follow
the typical additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) model.
It originates from electrical devices linked to the power grid
and exterior noise attached to the indoor network via
radiation or conduction. Based upon extensive study in [3],
it has been categorized into the following terms:
ai = radius of copper
conductor
ti = thickness of PVC
insulation: comparable with
that of the air space between
the conductors
Di = distance between
the two conductors
() =
=1 (). sin(2 + )
(12)
Di = (4.ti) + (2.ai)
(13)
Resistance, R =
Inductance, L =
Conductance, G =
(14)
Capacitance, C =
(15)
(16)
)
2
(17)
acosh( )
2
acosh(
Zc =
(18)
=
(19)
Where,
vp is the propagation velocity (m/s) and is equal to speed of
light/r
Where,
a = Radius of the conductor (m)
D = Distance between cables (m)
c = Permeability of conductor (H/m) = ro
r = Relative permeability of conductor
o = Free space permeability (H/m)
c = Conductivity of conductor (S/m)
d = Conductivity of dielectric material = d.tan
tan = Dissipation of dielectric material
1
= Skin depth (m) =
cc
(20)
_ =
_
2 . ,
=1
(21)
2
2
(22)
1 2 = 102 2
All through the simulation, the data rate and the packet
size are taken to be 6 Mbps and 300 respectively. The BER
results are obtained after analyzing one million symbols. A
range of the SNR values were used to evaluate the BER. The
signal power is taken to be 0.5 W. BPSK method is used for
the simulation process before which, a buffer is added to
make the sample time of input same as output.
(23)
achieving higher data rates and lower BER. MIMO uses the
diversity coding technique whereby it uses multiple
antennas at both receiver and transmitter side to send
multiple copies of the transmitted signal which are
independently faded.
MIMO systems can be defined as a link in which the
transmitting and the receiving ends are equipped with
multiple antenna elements as illustrated in Figure 8. The core
idea behind the MIMO system is the Space Time Block
Codes (STBC) in which time is complemented with the
spatial dimension inherent in the use of multiple spatially
distributed antennas which means that data is coded with
space and time [19].
= || ||2
(25)
y = Hx + n
(24)
Where,
x is the transmitted signal
H is the channel gain matrix and
n is the noise vector
11 12 1
H can be described as (21 22 2 ) with a Nt x Nr
1 2
dimension where each entry hi,j denotes the phase shift and
attenuation (transfer function) between the ith transmitter
and jth receiver. Space Time Block Codes are a general
version of Alamouti scheme [20]. These codes are
orthogonal and can attain full transmit diversity quantified
by the number of transmit antennas. The data are built as a
matrix which has its columns equivalent to the number of
transmit antennas and its rows equivalent to the number of
time slots necessary to transmit the data. At the receiver side,
the signals received are first combined and then sent to the
maximum likelihood detector where the decision guidelines
are employed [19]. The code rate which is denoted by the
number of transmitted symbols over the number of time slots
is 1 for the Alamouti scheme. It means that the Alamouti
scheme achieves full diversity gain without sacrificing its
data rate [20]. However, for higher number of transmit
antennas, full rate cannot be achieved and therefore it is
necessary to sacrifice data rate. As such, the code rate can be
or depending on the encoding algorithm [19].
The OSTBC decoder block has a simple decoding system
based on maximum likelihood at the receiver [21]. As shown
in Figure 9, the estimated coefficients of the channel, i.e. the
channel estimator and the combiner are given as input to the
ML detector. The channel estimator is a significant part of
the decoder whereby each transmitting and receiving
antenna characterize a channel coefficient. The decoder
accepts and combines all the input signals along with the
Where,
r = received vector
H = channel gain coefficient
d = distance metric
V. SIMULATION RESULTS
A. Performance of PLC channel (FIR filter) with varied
load impedances
The BER performance of the broadband indoor PLC
system is compared using three different scenarios by
varying the load impedances. As it can be observed in Figure
10, the 40 system shows a better performance than that of
10 and 70 . For the 70 system to reach the curve of 40
at BER of 10-3, an SNR of 1 dB is required. However, the
systems performance is improved as the load impedance
varies from 10 to 70 by 4.75 dB at a BER of 10-2. The
variation observed in the BER performance is due to the
evaluated weighting factors as explained in Section III.
VI. CONCLUSION
The main objective of this paper was to analyze the
performance of the broadband indoor PLC channel using
two different channel models. Implementation of the
multipath PLC model along with its noise modelling were
done. The systems performance was put into comparison
with a PLC-MIMO coded system with varying antennas and
code rates. From the attenuation profile, it has been observed
that the attenuation rises as the distance and frequency
increase. It increments by about 2.75 dB as the propagating
distance increases from path 1 to path 6 at 20 MHz. Thus, it
can be concluded that BB-PLC suffers more attenuation than
NB-PLC. For the phase profile, it is seen that as distance
increases, the frequency at which the signal is shifted by
phase decreases. PLC. Furthermore, it has been observed
that the systems performance is greatly affected by load
impedances whereby mismatching occurs causing reflection
and this in turn depends on the weighting factors. As the
BER performance of different load impedances was
analyzed, it showed that the 10 system was degraded by
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
[13]
[14]
VII. REFERENCES
[15]
[16]
10
[17] M.Arzberger,
K.Dostert,
T.Waldeck
and
M.Zimmermann, "Fundamental Properties of the Low
Voltage
Power
Distribution
Grid,"
Proc.
International
Symposium
on
Power-Line
Communications and Its Applications (ISPLC), 1997.
[18] L.T.Berger, A. P.Pagani and D.M.Schneider, "MIMO
Power Line Communicatons," IEEE Communications
Surveys & Tutorials, 2013.
[19] S.D.Santumon and B.R.Sujatha, "Space-TIme Block
Coding
(STBC)
for
Wireless
Networks,"
International Journal of Distributed and Parallel
Systems (IJDPS), vol. 3, no. 4, July 2012.
[20] S.Alamouti, "A simple transmit diversity technique
for wireless communications," IEEE Journal on
Selected Areas In Communications, vol. 16, pp. 14511458, Oct 1998.
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