Modeling and Analysis of Noise Effects on Broadband Power-Line Communications

Abstract

Power line noise is known to affect the performance of broadband power-line communications significantly. This paper presents a frequency-domain approach to characterize and model the statistical variation of power-line noise. The model considers both the background noise and the impulsive noise. The background noise model is based on statistical analysis of the results from two long-term measurements of noise spectrum conducted at two separate sites of a laboratory and a residential apartment. On the other hand, the impulsive noise model is obtained by direct measurements from the noise sources (i.e., various electrical household appliances). The amount of impulse noise reaching a power-line communications (PLC) receiver can then be determined with consideration of the channel transfer characteristics between the noise sources and the PLC receiver. Using these noise models, the performance of two major classes of digital modulation schemes, namely single-carrier modulation and multicarrier modulation, are analyzed and compared. It is found that the multicarrier scheme performs better than the single-carrier scheme when subjected to the observed power-line noise with non-Gaussian statistics.Index Terms-Noise modeling, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), performance study, power-line communications.

Capacity Performance of Overhead Transmission Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Broadband over Power Lines Networks: The Insidious Effect of Noise and the Role of Noise Models

“…Conversely, as frequency increases, noise PSD of background noise reduces and tends to spectrally flat AWGN. Indeed, the noise PSDs of the noise models tends to coincide at higher frequencies [22], [34]- [36], [39], [41], [42], [55]- [58].…”

“…Regardless of the power grid type -either SISO or MIMO, either OV or underground (UN), either HV or medium-voltage (MV) or low-voltage (LV)-, BPL noise may be considered as the superposition of five noise types, namely [1]- [11], [22], [30]- [36], [39], [41]- [43], [52], [55]- [58]: (i) the colored background noise; (ii) the narrowband noise; (iii) the periodic impulsive noise asynchronous to the mains frequency; (iv) the periodic impulsive noise synchronous to the mains frequency; and (v) the asynchronous impulsive noise. As it has already been reported in [1] and analyzed in [4], [6], [12], [13], [23], [29], [44], only the non resolvable limitations should be considered during the BPL capacity computations.…”

Impulsive Noise Characterization in Narrowband Power Line Communication

“…This is due to the fact that, in broadband PLC, the time duration of one OFDM symbol or frame is far shorter than one mains period, thus cyclostationary property is seldom considered. In [17], impulsive noise was modeled in frequency domain considering the channel transfer characteristics between noise source and receiver. In [18], based on physical and statistical properties of impulsive noise such as in [16], impulsive noise was modeled by starting with specific noise measurement.…”

Performance Analysis of PLC over Fading Channels with Colored Nakagami-m Background Noise

“…The additive noise in PLC can be classified into two broad categories, i.e., background noise and impulsive noise. The impulsive noise is mostly modeled by the Gaussian-mixture distributions, e.g., Bernoulli-Gaussian or Middleton's class-A distributions [2], while studies show that background noise in PLC follows the Nakagami-m distribution [3]- [5]. In addition, the background noise in the PLC channel is not white but colored.…”