Power line communication has recently attracted the attention of energy companies as a useful and natural technology for building the advanced metering infrastructure. In this context, device language message specification/companion specification for energy metering (DLMS/COSEM) is an increasingly popular standardised application protocol for communication between utilities and their customers. This study analyses the communication performance that can be expected when using the power line communication technology, powerline intelligent metering evolution (PRIME), to send DLMS/COSEM messages. Physical phenomena-such as background and impulsive noise sources, channel attenuation and multi-path effect-are taken into account during the first step in the evaluation of this technology's communication performance in the physical layer. This metric is then used in upper layers to compute the packet error rate. An analysis is carried out at the application layer in terms of expected latency in different communication environments. Several simulations are performed in a European low-voltage topology to compute the number of metres that can be read within 15 min. These simulations were carried out using MATLAB and OMNeT++ software.

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The present work analyzes and compares two of the most popular specifications for data transmission over power line networks: PRIME and G3-PLC. A description of the specifications together with simulation results of the performance of both solutions in a power line environment are presented. The simulation model has been built using the Matlab workspace. A simulation environment based on Matlab was developed to analyze G3-PLC and PRIME's behaviour with special focus on impulsive noise channels. To model such an environment, Middleton's Class-A noise model was used in conjunction with measured noise parameters reported in the literature for the narrow-band spectrum. The performance is measured in terms of bit error rate versus signal to noise ratio. Simulation results show how G3-PLC outperforms PRIME when the channel is impaired by such type of noise. Although the use of compressive sensing to cancel impulsive noise in communications has already been proposed in other studies, this paper details a modification based on Partial Fourier Matrix indexing according to diference sets. Results from simulations report an almost complete cancellation of the impulsive noise effects. An advantage of this technique is that no redundancy is added to the message, therefore no decrement in the transmission rate is experienced.