Time of arrival estimation in power line communication systems for home smart grids

Abstract

This paper deals with time synchronization of devices attached to a smart grid, whose accuracy tightly depends on the accurate estimation of the Time of Arrival (ToA) of the synchronization related messages sent over the power line communication systems. Usually smart grids are quite complex "systems of heterogeneous systems": the aim of this paper is to suggest a ToA detection mechanism that can use to forward time synchronization to the "last mile" link and inside the end user home. In particular in this paper, the use of a chirp-based preamble, borrowed from wireless communications (which suffer from multipath and noise like in power line communication) is proposed and tested by means of simulations and real experiments with narrowband PRIME technology. The results show very interesting performance even with narrowband chirps: the standard deviation of the ToA estimation is always in the order of 150 ns, even with loaded electrical grids.

A Survey of Clock Synchronization Over Packet-Switched Networks

“…The smart grid communications architecture can be decomposed into three main subnetworks: (i) wide area network (WAN) serving as the core network, (ii) neighborhood area network (NAN) for connecting the advanced metering infrastructure, and (iii) home area network (HAN) used to connect smart home appliances and sensors [35]. Note that the smart grid could have been included in the previous subsection on industrial applications, however we make a distinct subsection on this topic since timing for emerging smart grids is a critical requirement and is the subject of several recent studies [35]- [44]. Table IV lists several smart grid functionalities and their synchronization requirements, ranging from 1 μs to 100 ms, similar to the requirements of several industrial applications described in the previous subsection.…”