Simulation and Modelling of Power Line Channels

Abstract

Power Line Communication (PLC) is a substitute to wireless communication for providing high-speed broadband multimedia services to and within the office or home with the advantage of abolishing the requirement for additional power cables and thereby reducing communication infrastructure cost. The advancement of powerline requires adequate information of the PLC physical properties and characteristics to choose appropriate transmission methods. The various types of noise and multipath effects are the foremost impairments for power line channel which should be considered while designing PLC systems. In the present thesis, power line communication channel modelling is mainly focused. The channel modelling being an essential part of any communication system. Therefore a different modelling techniques of power line communication channel i.e. frequency domain and time domain (multipath) modelling are analyzed. In the multipath model, the parameters of signal transmission and multipath effects are considered accurately, that is based on experimental observation of actual channel characteristics. Furthermore, the transmission line approach divided the network into different autonomous sub-networks because of this;it can be applied to varying network topologies. In each modelling technique, the effects of multiple conditions such as variation in load, cable length and branch length are analyzed thoroughly, and observations are drawn from the simulation results. To evaluate the performance of PLC, present thesis simulates a multipath PLC channel model and provides the Bit-error-rate (BER) vs. signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) curve for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM).