In recent decades, power line communication (PLC) has attracted considerable attention from the research community and industry, as well as from regulatory and standardization bodies. In this paper, ...we provide an overview of both narrowband and broadband systems, covering potential applications, regulatory and standardization efforts, and recent research advancements in channel characterization, physical layer performance, medium access, and higher layer specifications and evaluations. We also identify the areas of current and further study that will enable the continued success of PLC technology.
Are Power Line Communications (PLC) a good candidate for Smart Grid applications? The objective of this paper is to address this important question. To do so, we provide an overview of what PLC can ...deliver today by surveying its history and describing the most recent technological advances in the area. We then address Smart Grid applications as instances of sensor networking and network control problems and discuss the main conclusions one can draw from the literature on these subjects. The application scenario of PLC within the Smart Grid is then analyzed in detail. Because a necessary ingredient of network planning is modeling, we also discuss two aspects of engineering modeling that relate to our question. The first aspect is modeling the PLC channel through fading models. The second aspect we review is the Smart Grid control and traffic modeling problem which allows us to achieve a better understanding of the communications requirements. Finally, this paper reports recent studies on the electrical and topological properties of a sample power distribution network. Power grid topological studies are very important for PLC networking as the power grid is not only the information source but also the information delivery system-a unique feature when PLC is used for the Smart Grid.
The article presents the cross-sectional results of analyzes of authentic conducted disturbances introduced into public power networks by various types of loads installed at end users. The foundation ...for the research was a set of 260 identified cases of Power Line Communication (PLC) transmission disturbances based on the Open Smart Grid Protocol (OSGP) technology, which were recorded in the urban network of the distribution system operator covering over 400,000 smart meters. The paper presents a quantitative assessment of the share of loads that most often cause problems with transmission efficiency. Moreover, a qualitative assessment of the detected disturbance cases was carried out in terms of conditions relating to the structure of the power grid and real transmission levels and disturbance levels. The authors made a pioneering analysis in the so-called "communication path" where the PLC communication disturbance was identified, i.e., from the installation point of the PLC concentrator to the metering point where the energy meter, with which the connection was lost, was installed.
Previous studies have shown that impulsive noise can weaken the performance of power line communication (PLC). Though DCSK can improve the performance in an order of magnitude comparing to the direct ...sequence differential phase shift keying (DS-DPSK), it is still a challenge to further improve the BER performance with signal redesign without the need of advanced and expensive extra noise suppression technologies. The paper introduces the model of asynchronous impulsive noise of Middleton class-A noise and corresponding multipath fading channels in PLC, and analyzes the bit error rate (BER) performance of the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">M </tex-math></inline-formula>-ary differential chaos shift keying (MDCSK) scheme over different channels. Furthermore, a new replica piecewise frame of MDCSK (RP-MDCSK) is proposed to resist the impulse noise. In the proposed scheme, one piecewise of signals is transmitted first. Then, it replicates <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">pw </tex-math></inline-formula> times, which serves as the reference signal transmitted in the first half symbol period. The information-bearing signal combines the reference signal with its Hilbert transform in the second half. At the receiver, one piece of reference signals is extracted and then correlated with its corresponding information-bearing part. The BER expressions of the MDCSK and the proposed scheme are derived and analyzed over different channels, and verified by simulations. Comparing with the corresponding schemes, it is found that the BER of the proposed scheme is by 2-3 orders of magnitude lower.
The business of distribution system operators is rapidly evolving as the distribution grid is hosting more distributed energy resources. Technology for monitoring, control, and protecting the grid is ...progressively pervading the lower segment of the network. These changes require a performing communication infrastructure to enable data exchange among the control centers of the grid. The 7th Framework Program European Project INTEGRIS proposes a hybrid infrastructure-based on broadband power line (BPL), Wi-Fi, and fiber optics (FO)-to enable services for grid management. This mix of technologies provides a balanced tradeoff between investments and benefits, meeting most of the requirements of the smart grid. This paper investigates the technologies that could be adopted and describes the experimental assessment performed in an operational environment in Italy. Using this installation, transfer time, time synchronization accuracy, dependability, and throughput are evaluated and analyzed over a long-term campaign. Results show that the FO is the best communication media, able to provide a two-way latency of 3 ms (95 percentile), whereas BPL has a two-way latency of 57 ms (95 percentile -4 hops). Those results confirm that a careful selection of the technologies is required to satisfy requirements of smart grid.
We introduce in-band full duplexing (IBFD) for broadband power line communication (BB-PLC) systems. Inspired by the use of IBFD in digital subscriber lines, Ethernet, cable communication, and ...recently in wireless communication, we investigate the constraints and requirements for a successful IBFD implementation in BB-PLC. We propose a two-stage IBFD structure consisting of an initial analog isolation using an active hybrid circuit, and a simplified mixed-domain digital echo cancellation procedure to suppress the self-interference. Furthermore, we enhance the digital cancellation filter to better adapt to linear periodically time-varying channel conditions, commonly encountered in PLC scenarios. We evaluate our solution under diverse power line channel and noise conditions to examine the overall data rate gains that can be achieved. Last, we extend IBFD to multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) BB-PLC systems that enable faster and/or more robust data transmission.
Power line communication (PLC) is the use of power lines for the purpose of electronic data transmission. The presence of additive noise, namely, background noise and impulsive noise, significantly ...affects the performance of a PLC system. While the background noise is modeled by Nakagami-m distribution, the impulsive noise is modeled using Middleton class A distribution. In this letter, we study the performance of a PLC system under the combined effect of Nakagami-m background noise and Middleton class A impulsive noise assuming binary phase shift keying signaling. The probability density function of decision variable under the influence of additive noise (sum of background noise and impulsive noise) is derived. We also derive an analytical expression for the average bit error rate of the considered PLC system. The analytical expressions are validated by close matching to the simulation results. The analysis presented in this letter closely predicts the behavior of the PLC system under the combined effect of background and impulsive noises.
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) is made possible by learning a projection function between a feature space and a semantic space (e.g., an attribute space). Key to ZSL is thus to learn a projection that is ...robust against the often large domain gap between the seen and unseen class domains. In this work, this is achieved by unseen class data synthesis and robust projection function learning. Specifically, a novel semantic data synthesis strategy is proposed, by which semantic class prototypes (e.g., attribute vectors) are used to simply perturb seen class data for generating unseen class ones. As in any data synthesis/hallucination approach, there are ambiguities and uncertainties on how well the synthesised data can capture the targeted unseen class data distribution. To cope with this, the second contribution of this work is a novel projection learning model termed competitive bidirectional projection learning (BPL) designed to best utilise the ambiguous synthesised data. Specifically, we assume that each synthesised data point can belong to any unseen class; and the most likely two class candidates are exploited to learn a robust projection function in a competitive fashion. As a third contribution, we show that the proposed ZSL model can be easily extended to few-shot learning (FSL) by again exploiting semantic (class prototype guided) feature synthesis and competitive BPL. Extensive experiments show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art results on both problems.
We propose a belief propagation list (BPL) decoder with comparable performance to the successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder of polar codes, which already achieves the maximum likelihood (ML) ...bound of polar codes for sufficiently large list size L. The proposed decoder is composed of multiple parallel independent belief propagation (BP) decoders based on differently permuted polar code factor graphs. A list of possible transmitted codewords is generated and the one closest to the received vector, in terms of Euclidean distance, is picked. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed BPL decoder provides the best performance of plain polar codes under iterative decoding known so far. The proposed algorithm does not require any changes in the polar code structure itself, rendering the BPL into an alternative to the SCL decoder, equipped with a soft output capability enabling, e.g., iterative detection and decoding to further improve performance. Further benefits are the lower decoding latency than the SCL decoder and the possibility of high throughput implementations. Additionally, we show that a different selection strategy of frozen bit positions can further enhance the error-rate performance of the proposed decoder.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and power line communications (PLCs) are used in this work to implement a smart home control network. The goals are to reduce the impact of wireless interference on a ...smart home control network and unnecessary energy consumption of a smart home. An isolated WSN with one coordinator, which is integrated into the PLC transceiver, is established in each room. The coordinator is responsible for transferring environmental parameters obtained by WSNs to the management station via PLCs. The control messages for home appliances are directly transferred using PLCs rather than WSNs. According to the experimental results, the impact of wireless interference on the proposed smart home control network is substantially mitigated. Additionally, a smart control algorithm for lighting systems and an analysis of the illumination of a fluorescent lamp were presented. The energy saving of lighting systems relative to those without smart control was evaluated. Numerical results indicate that the electricity consumption on a sunny or cloudy day can be reduced by at least 40% under the smart control. Moreover, a prototype for the proposed smart home control network with the smart control algorithm was implemented. Experimental tests demonstrate that the proposed system for smart home control networks is practically feasible and performs well.
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