NB-PLC channel: Estimation of periodic impulsive noise parameters and mitigation techniques

Narrowband Power Line Communication (NB-PLC) plays a key role in the deployment of smart grid, since it is a widely spread technology for smart grid applications and systems, like the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) system. In this paper, we study the characteristics of the NB-PLC channel and noise. A method is proposed to estimate the occurrence and duration of the dominant category of noise, the periodic impulsive noise, which greatly degrades the signal quality. A technique is proposed to mitigate the noise effect, with the use of Luby Transform (LT) codes. The proposed scheme exploits the features of the dominant noise on the NB-PLC channel and mitigates its effect especially in highly noisy environments. An estimation algorithm of the burst time occurrence and its duration is introduced. The system can estimate these parameters with an accuracy in the range of 10−4 and it can work even without channel state information. The proposed scheme is compared to two popular NB-PLC technologies, namely the PRIME and G3-PLC, whereas the results show that it can be very effective under severe noise conditions.