BER evaluation of post-meter PLC services in CENELEC-C band

Abstract

Low voltage, in-home power-line communications (PLC) networks allow direct communication between smart meters (SM) and in-home devices (IHD). In order to minimize security issues, in many deployment scenarios transmission takes place only towards the IHD to display consumption data, with no backwards channel. As a result, channel estimation is difficult and it is necessary to use robust transmission techniques to mitigate the effect of the impulsive noise within the PLC channel. Performance of such system must be evaluated by taking into account realistic interference and channel models for a broad range of configurations. In this work we focus on performance in terms of bit error rate (BER) of a narrowband PLC (NB-PLC) operating in the CENELEC-C band (125–140 kHz) taking into account realistic noise models. Our system is based on binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation.