Working Group on Power Line Communications

Indoor PLC channels can be modeled, as shown in the figure below, by means of a linear and periodically time-varying (LPTV) filter and a cyclostationary noise (see [1] below). The latter is composed of three terms: background noise, impulsive noise and narrowband interferences [3]. In this section you can download all the elements required to perform transmission techniques simulations following this model.

Copyright Notice: All the information provided in this section is freely usable for non commercial activities provided you cite the re

In the following links you can download the second release of a software package that contains a power line channel generator and its corresponding user guide. The fundamentals of this channel generator are given in [2].

The package contains a set of MATLAB© functions that provide frequency responses for realistic in-home and small offices channels from a simple network topology. The user guide explains the procedure to generate channes in both a random and a deterministic way. As an example, the figures below depict the frequency response of an LTI (a), and an LPTV channel (b), obtained with the generator.

The User's Guide provides default values to obtain the three representative LTI channels shown in the figure below and labeled as best-case, medium-case and worst-case. Their frequency responses can be downloaded from the .mat file given below.

In the links below you can find the instantaneous power spectral density (PSD) of the background noise and some of the impulsive noise terms measured at three scenarios (apartment, detached house and university offices and labs). They have been obtained using the procedure described in [3].

Each Matlab© file contains a matrix “psdn” with 15 equally spaced snapshots (within the 20 ms of the European mains cycle) of the instantaneous PSD of the background noise sampled at 32469 frequency points in the band from 0 up to 25 MHz. The units of “psdn” are dBm/kHz. The figure below depicts their magnitude.

Each of the three Matlab© files below contains the waveform of an impulsive noise component sampled at 50 MHz. The first one corresponds to a periodic synchronous component, while the other correspond to periodic asynchronous terms. All the amplitudes are in volts. The figures below show their pulse waveforms. The periodic synchronous impulse appears once per mains cycle, while the repetition rates of the periodic asynchronous impulses are 26.3 kHz for component 1 and 48.93 kHz for component 2. The latter term is present all the time, however, the periodic asynchronous component 1 does only appear in certains instants of the mains cycle, as shown in the shaded areas of the figure below.

Narrowband interferences can be generated as amplitude or frequency modulated signals. A description of their main characteristics can be found in [3].

[1] F. J. Cañete, J. A. Cortés, L. Díez, and J. T. Entrambasaguas, “Analysis of the cyclic short-term variation of indoor power line channels,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 24, no. 7, pp. 1327–1338, 2006.

[2] F. J. Cañete, J. A. Cortés, L. Díez and J. T. Entrambasaguas, ”A Channel Model Proposal for Indoor Power Line Communications”, IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 49, Issue 12, December 2011, pp. 166-174.

[3] J. A. Cortés, L. Díez, F. J. Cañete, and J. J. Sánchez-Martínez, “Analysis of the Indoor Broadband Power-Line Noise Scenario,” IEEE Transactions on Electromagnetic Compatibility, Vol. 52, No. 4, Nov. 2010, pp. 849-858.