A simplified model for the indoor power line channel

Abstract

We report for the first time some statistical properties of the indoor power line (PL) channel that exhibit some interesting similarities to the wireless channel, although some fundamental differences are also pointed out. In particular, we argue here that, while multipath propagation in wireless channels gives rise to Rayleigh distributed fading, multipath in PL channels gives rise to lognormally distributed fading similarly to shadow fading. We also report for the first time that both channel gain and Root-Mean-Square Delay Spread (RMS-DS) of indoor channels are lognormally distributed, leptokurtic and negatively correlated, thus suggesting that channels that introduce severe multipath are also characterized by large attenuation. These results are used to define a simplified PL channel model useful for comparative analysis of communication schemes and, at the same time, to draw some general conclusions on the design of multicarrier schemes.