Power line channel measurements and analysis in a cruise ship is the topic of this paper. Applications and benefits that the deployment of power line communication in a ship environment can bring, justify research initiatives targeting the study of channel characteristics. We have carried out a channel measurement campaign over the low voltage power distribution network of housing and public areas in the band 0-50 MHz. The data have been used to study the statistics of the channel, and in particular, of the average channel gain, RMS delay spread, coherence bandwidth. The analysis of theoretical capacity in the band 2-28 MHz (used by state-of-the art PLC technology) shows that it is in excess of 200 Mbps and up 600 Mbps depending on the background noise level and power line network segment of the ship. The capacity increases by up to 85% in the band 2-50 MHz. Furthermore, the three-phase electrical distribution allows the exploitation of multiple-input multiple-output transmission which can double the capacity as the results in this paper show.
We consider the design of the front-end receiver for broadband power line communications. We focus on the design of the input impedance that maximizes the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver. We show that the amplitude, rather than the power, of the received signal is important for communication purposes. Furthermore, we show that the receiver impedance impacts the amplitude of the noise term. We focus on the background noise, and we propose a novel description of the noise experienced at the receiver port of a PLC network. We model the noise as the sum of four uncorrelated contributions, that is, the active, resistive, receiver, and coupled noise components. We study the optimal impedance design problem for real in-home grids that we assessed with experimental measurements. We describe the results of the measurement campaign, and we report the statistics of the optimal impedance. Hence, we study the best attainable performance when the optimal receiver impedance is deployed. We focus on the SNR and the maximum achievable rate, and we show that power matching is suboptimal with respect to the proposed impedance design approach.
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