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.

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SUMMARYThis paper provides an overview of power line communication (PLC) applications, challenges and possible evolution. Emphasis is put on two relevant aspects: a) channel characterization and modeling, b) filter bank modulation for spectral efficient transmission. The main characteristics of both the indoor channel (in-home, in-ship, in-car) and the outdoor low voltage and medium voltage channels are reported and compared. A simple approach to statistically model the channel frequency response (CFR) is described and it is based on the generation of a vector of correlated random variables. To overcome the channel distortions, it is shown that filter bank modulation can provide robust performance. In particular, it is shown that the sub-channel spectral containment of filtered multitone modulation (FMT) can provide high notching capability and spectral efficiency. Reduced complexity can be obtained with a cyclic filter bank modulation approach that we refer to as cyclic block FMT modulation (CB-FMT) which still provides higher spectral flexibility/efficiency than OFDM. key words: power line communications, power line channel, channel model, filter bank modulation

The high amount of applications to be implemented in the Smart Grid requires bi-directional connectivity between a multitude of nodes with a reliable, high speed, low latency, energy efficient and cost effective communication technology. Power line communication (PLC) has the potentiality to meet the requirements. Indeed, there exists space for PLC technology improvements and to overcome the challenges mostly due to a hostile communication medium. There are two considered frequency spectra: a narrowband (3-500 kHz) spectrum and a broad band (1.8-86 MHz) spectrum that are exploited by current technology. In this paper, we discuss the usage of these spectra both in LV and MV networks, highlighting pros and cons and advocating the realization of an adaptive technology that can cognitively make the best usage of available resources so that the requirements of reliability, latency and coverage can be met.

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