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In recent decades, power line communication has attracted considerable attention from the research community and industry, as well as from regulatory and standardization bodies. In this article 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 areas of current and further study that will enable the continued success of power line communication technology.essentially concerned with coexistence with other systems that also use the power grid (i.e. machines and appliances that draw electricity) and wireless systems operating in the same frequency bands as PLC. The frequency range used for today's PLC solutions starts as low as 125 Hz and reaches as high as 100 MHz. A useful classification of PLC systems according to frequency bands has been introduced in [28]: it distinguishes between ultra-narrowband (UNB), narrowband (NB) and broadband (BB) PLC systems, operating between about 125-3000 Hz, 3-500 kHz and 1.8-100 MHz, respectively. Most recent developments in standardization and regulation activities over the past 20 or so years apply to NB and BB PLC systems, and we will focus on these in the following.

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.

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