Power line communication is envisaged for the future more electric aircraft and the scenario studied in this work deals with the cabin lighting system, since its tree-shaped architecture is sufficiently complicated to be representative of many other aircraft harness configurations. The statistical characteristics of the propagation channels are deduced from the measurements made on a representative test bench, the experimental values of the insertion gain being also compared with those obtained from a theoretical model based on the multiconductor transmission line theory. Field-programmable gate array-based modems have been designed and the performance of links are described and compared with predicted values deduced from a software tool simulating the link