In this paper, an FPGA-based channel emulator for indoor Power Line Communications (PLC) is described. It has been designed for a band up to 30MHz and is able to emulate time-varying channels and to generate a great variety of disturbances.
I. INTRODUCTIONIn the last two decades, a remarkable research effort has been put in PLC systems. These systems cover three main applications: access, the use of the low voltage power network as a last mile solution; indoors, the use of power grids inside small offices and homes as support for local area networks and in-vehicle, the use of on-board power grid for control and data transmission purposes. Nowadays, it is the second one that attracts more commercial interest, at least in the developed countries. In particular, this technology is very appropriate for the triple play service, i.e. to distribute telephone, internet access and digital video (that are provided by means of ADSL or cable) inside the consumer premises. This work is oriented to indoor broadband PLC systems and consists in the design and implementation of a channel emulator that helps in the development of future devices for this specific application.Although the digital transmission over power lines is an old issue, it was mainly focused on low bit-rate applications that require little bandwidth, below 500kHz. It was not until the nineties when the characterization and modeling of PLC channels in a broader band was carried out. Since then, PLC channels started to reveal a quite interesting behavior. At the beginning, the research was centered on Linear Time Invariant (LTI) channel models [1][2], the simplest approach, but soon the time varying character of the channel was spotted [3]. However, regarding the noise characterization, since pioneer works, non stationary components were considered [4].Other PLC channel emulators have been proposed [5] [6], but, to the authors' knowledge, this is the first one designed to implement a time-varying channel. In particular, the basis of this emulator is the Cyclic Channel model synchronous with the mains frequency described in [7].The organization of the paper is as follows. The next section is a general description of the emulator characteristics, both
Abstract-A novel artificial transmission line with right/left-handed behavior is presented in this paper. The unit cell of the new artificial line consists of one series and one shunt wire bonded interdigital capacitors. When wire bonded interdigital capacitors are used, the artificial line has a wider frequency band of operation. A combined analytical-graphical design method of the proposed artificial transmission line is also presented. The method has been assessed with the help of an electromagnetic solver based on the method of moments, and experimental work.
This paper presents a statistical characterization of in-vehicle power lines, based on channel measurements carried out in a automobile. In particular, the impact of the engine speed on the characteristics of the channels is analyzed. Performance of an Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system is assessed using the channel measurements.
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