Comunicação digital em canais PLC: técnicas de transmissão, detecção e caracterização de canais PLC outdoor brasileiros

Abstract

This dissertation aims at discussing the measurement and characterization of outdoor electric power grid of low voltage as communication medium (power line communication - PLC). Statistical analyses carried out on several parameters such as average channel gain, coherence time, coherence bandwidth, delay spread, length of the channel impulse response, and channel capacity, when it is considered the frequency bands from 1.7 to 30 MHz, from 1.7 up to 50 MHz, and from 1.7 up to 100 MHz, are presented. These analyses reveal the circumstances in which outdoor and low-voltage electric power grids can be advantageous to support a reliable and efficient PLC system operation. Moreover, power spectral density models of additive noise and sparse representation of PLC channels are proposed. Also, a PLC time-varying channels model generator that makes use of coherence time is introduced. The proposed model generator, which is validated with measured PLC channels, is an effective tool to carry out performance analysis of PLC systems. Finally, PLC channel estimation is highlighted as an opportunity for the application of compressive sampling-based techniques. The use of traditional OFDM - based channel estimation techniques and the ones based on compressive sensing gives some directions for advancing channel estimation techniques for PLC channels.