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In the envisioned 6G internet of things (IoT), visible light communication (VLC) has emerged as one promising candidate to mitigate the frequency spectrum crisis. However, when working as the access point, VLC has to be connected with the backbone network via other wire communication solutions. Typically, power line communication (PLC) is viewed as an excellent match to VLC, which is capable of providing both a power supply and backbone network connection. Generally, the integration of PLC and VLC is taken into consideration for the above hybrid system for channel characteristics analysis. However, almost all current works focus on hybrid PLC and VLC, based on a conventional Lambertian optical beam configuration, and fail to address the applications of hybrid PLC and VLC based on distinct optical beam configurations. To address this issue, in this paper, the channel characteristics of hybrid PLC and VLC, based on distinct optical beam configurations, are explored and illustrated. Numerical results show that, for a central position of the receiver, compared with an achievable rate of about 194 Mbps for hybrid PLC and VLC with a baseline Lambertian optical beam configuration, the counterparts of a hybrid channel based on Rebel and NSPW optical beams are about 173.4 Mbps and 222.4 Mbps. Moreover, the effect of azimuth rotation is constructed and estimated for hybrid PLC and VLC, adopting a typical rotating asymmetric beam configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to enhance spectral efficiency in communication systems by dynamically adjusting the mapping between cyclic permutation coding (CPC) and its injected form. By monitoring channel conditions such as interference levels and impulsive noise strength, the system optimises the coding scheme to maximise data transmission reliability and efficiency. The CPC method employed in this work maps information bits onto non-binary symbols in a cyclic manner, aiming to improve the Hamming distance between mapped symbols. To address challenges such as low data rates inherent in permutation coding, injection techniques are introduced by removing δ column(s) from the CPC codebook. Comparative analyses demonstrate that the proposed dynamic adaptation scheme outperforms conventional permutation coding and injection schemes. Additionally, we present a generalised mathematical expression to describe the relationship between the spectral efficiencies of both coding schemes. This dynamic approach ensures efficient and reliable communication in environments with varying levels of interference and impulsive noise, highlighting its potential applicability to systems like power line communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In-band full-duplex (IBFD) is an attractive technology in broadband power line communication (BB-PLC) because it helps to improve spectral efficiency. However, IBFD is challenging since it requires additional hardware and advanced signal processing to mitigate self-interference (SI) signals. SI cancelation architectures and channel estimation techniques determine the overall IBFD performance. Accurate SI channel estimation is required since imperfect SI cancelation reduces signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), causing an increase in data errors and a decrease in data rates. Although channel estimation can be improved by sending additional training symbols, increasing the training duration will lower data throughput. Thus, the training symbol number is an essential trade-off for IBFD performance in BB-PLC. In this paper, we investigate IBFD performance in single-input single-output (SISO), single-input multiple-output (SIMO), and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication scenarios, including the influence of the training period. By analyzing error vectors on a constellation diagram, we obtain the closed-form expressions for the symbol error probability (SEP) affected by IBFD and the training duration. Based on the obtained expressions, we propose a bit allocation algorithm to determine bit loading to ensure reliable IBFD communication. Furthermore, we suggest a procedure to compute the optimal training symbol number that maximizes throughput in IBFD. Using the proposed bit allocation strategy and a database of measured channels, we estimated the achievable bidirectional throughput and the throughput gain in IBFD compared to time division duplexing (TDD).

Hybridisation of networks is a trend that will continue to evolve for more efficient communication solutions. Hybrid power line communication (PLC) and wireless networks deployed for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications have improved the efficiency of low-power and lossy networks (LLNs). State-of-the-art solutions on hybrid networks are mainly application specific and does not provide a mathematical model to evaluate the network performance. Furthermore, the parallel PLC and wireless networks result in more power consumption due to the additional circuitry required to support and switch between two networks. There is a need for a generalized study on hybrid network architectures. A mathematical model must be developed to evaluate the performance of hybrid networks. Unlike parallel PLC and wireless networks, some intermediate solutions must be proposed that can offer the benefits of wired and wireless networks without increasing power consumption and circuit complexity. The paper presents a generalized study on hybrid network architectures. A hybrid network has been proposed that can offer the benefits of wired and wireless networks in the best possible way. A novel Markov-based stochastic model has been developed to evaluate the reliability of hybrid network designs. The analytical results obtained from Continuous Time Markov Chains (CTMC) have been validated by simulation using MATLAB. Spectral and energy efficiency have been evaluated for the hybrid designs along with a trade-off analysis. The proposed hybrid network (with 50% jump nodes being hybridized) is 33.53% more reliable for data transmission than parallel wired and wireless networks after 100 hours of operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the envisioned 6G internet of things (IoT), visible light communication (VLC) has emerged as one promising candidate to mitigate the frequency spectrum crisis. However, when working as the access point, VLC has to be connected with the backbone network via other wire communication solutions. Typically, power line communication (PLC) is viewed as an excellent match to VLC, which is capable of providing both a power supply and backbone network connection. Generally, the integration of PLC and VLC is taken into consideration for the above hybrid system for channel characteristics analysis. However, almost all current works focus on hybrid PLC and VLC, based on a conventional Lambertian optical beam configuration, and fail to address the applications of hybrid PLC and VLC based on distinct optical beam configurations. To address this issue, in this paper, the channel characteristics of hybrid PLC and VLC, based on distinct optical beam configurations, are explored and illustrated. Numerical results show that, for a central position of the receiver, compared with an achievable rate of about 194 Mbps for hybrid PLC and VLC with a baseline Lambertian optical beam configuration, the counterparts of a hybrid channel based on Rebel and NSPW optical beams are about 173.4 Mbps and 222.4 Mbps. Moreover, the effect of azimuth rotation is constructed and estimated for hybrid PLC and VLC, adopting a typical rotating asymmetric beam configuration.

A multiple input multiple output (MIMO) power line communication (PLC) model for industrial facilities was developed that uses the physics of a bottom-up model but can be calibrated like top-down models. The PLC model considers 4-conductor cables (three-phase conductors and a ground conductor) and has several load types, including motor loads. The model is calibrated to data using mean field variational inference with a sensitivity analysis to reduce the parameter space. The results show that the inference method can accurately identify many of the model parameters, and the model is accurate even when the network is modified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impulsive noise is one of the foremost situations in power line communications that degrades the performance of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing used for the power line communications channel. In this paper, a channel version of the broadband power line communications is assumed when evaluating the bit error rate performance. Three impulsive noise environments are assumed, namely heavily, moderately, and weakly disturbed. The well-known time domain mitigation techniques are tested first. These are clipping, blanking, and mixing clipping with blanking. The results of Matlab simulations show that these time-domain mitigation techniques don't significantly improve the bit error rate performance. A hybrid domain of time and frequency mitigation technique is used to enhance the bit error rate performance. The Matlab simulation results show that this hybrid domains of time and frequency approach outperforms time domain nonlinearities and can largely improve the bit error rate performance. Signal to noise ratio gains of about 8 dB, 10 dB, and 10 dB are obtained for heavily, moderately, and weakly disturbed channels, respectively, using the domains of time and frequency mitigation technique at bit error rate of 10−3 when compared to the blanking time domain technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Channel coding provides numerous advantages to digital communications. One of such advantages is error correcting capabilities. This, however, comes at the expense of coding rate, which is a function of the codebook’s cardinality |C| or number of coded information bits and the codeword length M. In order to achieve high coding rate, we hereby report a channel coding approach that is capable of error correction under power line communications (PLC) channel conditions, with permutation coding as the coding scheme of choice. The approach adopts the technique of unequal error correction for binary codes, but with the exception that non-binary permutation codes are employed here. As such, certain parts of the information bits are coded with permutation symbols, while transmitting other parts uncoded. Comparisons with other conventional permutation codes are presented, with the proposed scheme exhibiting a relatively competitive performance in terms of symbol error rate.

Impulsive noise is one of the foremost situations in power line communications that degrades the performance of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing used for the power line communications channel. In this paper, a channel version of the broadband power line communications is assumed when evaluating the bit error rate performance. Three impulsive noise environments are assumed, namely heavily, moderately, and weakly disturbed. The well-known time domain mitigation techniques are tested first. These are clipping, blanking, and mixing clipping with blanking. The results of Matlab simulations show that these time-domain mitigation techniques don't significantly improve the bit error rate performance. A hybrid domain of time and frequency mitigation techniques are used to enhance the bit error rate performance. The Matlab simulation results show that this hybrid domain of time and frequency approach outperforms time domain nonlinearities and can largely improve the bit error rate performance. Signal-to-noise ratio gains of about 8 dB, 10 dB, and 10 dB are obtained for heavily, moderately, and weakly disturbed channels, respectively, using the domains of time and frequency mitigation technique at a bit error rate of when compared to the blanking time domain technique.

The article presents the cross-sectional results of analyzes of authentic conducted disturbances introduced into public power networks by various types of loads installed at end users. The foundation for the research was a set of 260 identified cases of Power Line Communication (PLC) transmission disturbances based on the Open Smart Grid Protocol (OSGP) technology, which were recorded in the urban network of the distribution system operator covering over 400,000 smart meters. The paper presents a quantitative assessment of the share of loads that most often cause problems with transmission efficiency. Moreover, a qualitative assessment of the detected disturbance cases was carried out in terms of conditions relating to the structure of the power grid and real transmission levels and disturbance levels. The authors made a pioneering analysis in the so-called “communication path” where the PLC communication disturbance was identified, i.e., from the installation point of the PLC concentrator to the metering point where the energy meter, with which the connection was lost, was installed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power line infrastructure is available almost everywhere. Positioning systems aim to estimate where a device or target is. Consequently, there may be an opportunity to use power lines for positioning purposes. This survey article reports the different efforts, working principles, and possibilities for implementing positioning systems relying on power line infrastructure for power line positioning systems (PLPS). Since Power Line Communication (PLC) systems of different characteristics have been deployed to provide communication services using the existing mains, we also address how PLC systems may be employed to build positioning systems. Although some efforts exist, PLPS are still prospective and thus open to research and development, and we try to indicate the possible directions and potential applications for PLPS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this paper is to study the preliminary selection of one or more Power Line Communications protocols or standards, to be used in a full duplex communication between a wind turbine and a command center powered by this wind turbine. This situation considers that the wind turbine is located in an isolated area in the Patagonia-Austral region, working under severe climate conditions.

Miniaturized single-mode thickness-shear pressure transducer combined with high-temperature SOI, silicon on insulator, integrated circuit technology is proposed as network-ready high-pressure high-resolution smart sensor for distributed data acquisition in oil and gas production wells. The transducer miniaturization is investigated with a full 3D computer model previously developed by the authors to assess the impact of intrinsic losses and various geometrical features on transducer performance. Over the last decades there has been a trend toward size reduction of high-resolution pressure transducer. The implemented model provides insight into the evolution of high-resolution pressure transducers from Hewlett-Packard™ to Quartzdyne™ and beyond. Distributed measurement in production oil wells in extreme harsh environment, such as found in the pre-salt layer, is an unsolved problem. The industry move toward electrified wells offers an opportunity for application of smart sensor technology and power line communications to achieve distributed high-resolution data acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small cells are low-power and low-range radio access nodes that can be used to increase network capacity in reduced areas with high traffic demand and to provide coverage to small isolated zones. As their number is expected to be very high, connecting them to the aggregation point in a cost-efficient manner is a key challenge, and there is consensus that none of the current technologies is valid for all scenarios. Since lamp-posts are one of the most convenient locations for outdoor small cells, this work analyzes the use of power line communications (PLC) over outdoor public lighting networks (OPLN) as a backhaul technology for outdoor small cell deployments. To this end, the characteristics of the PLC channels established in OPLN are firstly assessed. The analysis combines noise measurements performed in existing OPLN and channel responses obtained from a multiconductor transmission line (MTL) model. The attenuation, delay spread and spatial correlation of the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels are investigated and their influence in the physical layer parameters of PLC systems is discussed. Afterward, the performance achieved by state-of-the-art PLC systems is assessed. To this end, estimations obtained by means of simulations and measurements taken in actual networks are included. Data throughput achieved by PLC systems based on the ITU-T G.hn standard, as well as the expected improvements obtained by 3 x 3 MIMO systems, are given. Results indicate that PLC can be an interesting technology for coverage-driven small cell deployments with backhaul length shorter than 150 m, offering throughput values similar to existing Sub-6 GHz wireless solutions in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions and wired ones like G.fast.

In-band full-duplex (IBFD) is an attractive solution for increasing the throughput of Power Line Communication (PLC) systems. In IBFD, each network node is allowed to transmit and receive simultaneously in the same frequency band. This paper discusses the importance of defining figures of merit to analyze IBFD performance, which is often forgotten by the literature that addresses IBFD from a pure system level and signal processing perspective. This is because in IBFD hardware-related aspects are of great importance. The focus is then given to the first self-interference (SI) cancellation stage, namely the analog coupling and self-interference cancellation stage (ASICS). Two architectures are considered. A detailed analysis is offered by taking into account circuit-level aspects. A broadband multiple conductor PLC scenario is assumed to enable multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) IBFD communication. The first considered architecture performs SI subtraction exploiting operational amplifiers. The second proposed architecture exploits the characteristics of a three ports magnetic circuit together with a signal generator to remove the SI. Design, analysis, and hardware realization of these circuits have been done to compare and show the practical feasibility of the ASICS for PLC, well known to be challenged by its line impedance matching problems and severe frequency selective channel characteristics. This paper is the first documented contribution of the IBFD ASICS for $2\times 2$ MIMO broadband PLC physically realized and tested in the field.

Several experiments and field trials have shown that deterministic components characterize the Power Line Communication (PLC) noise across multiple-conductors. This article aims at understanding the main origins of these noise components and evaluate several methods to characterize them statistically. The correlation, distance-correlation, mutual information estimation, and a proposed linear coefficient ratio, are used to analyze the noise time-series statistically. The analysis of the PLC noise deterministic components allow us to develop an enhanced noise model that includes them. The presence of deterministic noise fosters the development of coding and decoding algorithms that aim at mitigating the noise effect. New decoding techniques called Quasi-Deterministic-Decoding are detailed and tested with single-input-multiple-output (SIMO) $1\times 2$ and multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) $2\times 2$ transmission configurations using real PLC noise and channel realizations. The proposed model leads to a better representation of the PLC noise traces and, consequently, the development of improved coding algorithms for reliable data transmission at low signal-to-noise ratios.

The electrical submersible pump (ESP) is widely used in the oil industry as an artificial lift method in deep wells, and its primary application of ESP is to increase the oil flow rate. Information such as the pump intake and discharge pressure, the oil reservoir and motor winding temperature, etc., provide critical data necessary to ensure proper ESP system operation and optimize production. In this article, an ESP downhole parameter monitoring system is proposed. Potentiometers are used to generates analog signals, emulating the analog sensors. The information is sent up to the surface based on the current loop through the same power cable by DC signals overlapping to AC signals in the proposed design. The article details the construction of the communication protocol and electronic circuits used in telemetry. The tests were carried out in an oil-producing company to validate the proposed telemetry system's reliability and accuracy. The good results of the robust design demonstrated it to be a promising downhole sensor for industrial applications.

The mixture of wireless and power line communications (PLC) is vital for implementing new applications in smart grid and vehicular communications. In this work, we investigate the performance of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based dual-hop hybrid communication systems with decode-and-forward relay. The wireless channel is characterized by Nakagami-m fading under an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), while the PLC channels are characterized by Log-normal distribution with Bernoulli Gaussian noise including both background and impulsive noise components. New closed-form expressions for the outage probability, the asymptotic outage probability and ergodic capacity are derived and verified via extensive representative simulations. For more insights on the outage performance, we analyze the diversity order. Additionally, we proposed a power allocation optimization technique to achieve an outage-optimal performance. The results show that the system outage probability improves as the impulsive noise index and the arrival probability of the impulsive component of the PLC additive noise decrease, while their effect is negligible on the ergodic capacity. Finally, the performance of the proposed system is compared against a benchmark OMA-based system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the delay performance of a wireless-power line mixed network via a stochastic network calculus (SNC)-based approach. The data transmission in this mixed network is modeled by a two-stage tandem queue, wherein the data is first relayed through a wireless fading channel and then transmitted over a power line communication (PLC) system. The Rayleigh fading captures the wireless fading channel; whereas, the PLC channel gain is characterized by the log-normal distribution. The statistical characteristics of the service processes of both the wireless channel and PLC channel are derived. With any given traffic arrival and the service capability derived, the delay can be easily bounded via SNC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital communication over power lines is an active field of research and most studies in this field focus on low-voltage (LV) and medium-voltage (MV) power systems. Nevertheless, as power companies are starting to provide communication services and as smart-grid technologies are being incorporated into power networks, high-voltage (HV) power-line communication has become attractive. The main constraint of conventional HV power-line carrier (PLC) systems is their unfeasibility for being migrated to wideband channels, even with a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this scenario, none of the current linear/non-linear equalizers used in single carrier schemes achieve the complete compensation of the highly dispersive conditions, which limits their operation to 4 kHz channels. In this paper, a new PLC-channel model is introduced for transmission lines incorporating the effects of the coupling equipment. In addition, the use of the single-carrier frequency-division modulation (SC-FDM) is proposed as a solution to operate PLC systems in a wide bandwidth, achieving transmission speeds above those of the conventional PLC system. The results presented in this paper demonstrate the superior performance of the SC-FDM-PLC over conventional PLC systems, obtaining a higher transmission capacity in 10 to 30 times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arriving at a good combination of coding and modulation schemes that can achieve good error correction constitutes a challenge in digital communication systems. In this work, we explore the combination of permutation coding (PC) and pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) for mitigating channel errors in the presence of background noise and jitter. Since PAM is characterised with bi-polar constellations, Euclidean distance is a good choice for predicting the performance of such coded modulation setup. In order to address certain challenges facing PCs, we therefore introduce injections in the coding system, together with a modified form of PAM system. This modification entails constraining the PAM constellations to the size of the codeword’s symbol. The results obtained demonstrate the strength of the modified coded PAM system over the conventional PC coded PAM system.

The out-of-order execution mechanism is widely used in modern processors. However, meltdown attacks exploit this mechanism to allow malicious instructions to capture sensitive data from kernel domains. This work aims to present a new meltdown attack, called Meltweb. It is a new approach in the category of privileged speculative execution attacks to leak arbitrary data into address spaces and privilege limits. Meltweb can be implemented from linear execution without the need for page faults, eliminating the need for an exception suppression mechanism, thus allowing the attack to be executed throughout the system of arbitrary code without privileges as in search engines interpretation of Javascript. To exemplify the performance of the attack, two proof-of-concept variants were developed that demonstrate the ability to perform the attack natively, as well as remotely using Javascript. The attack developed showed satisfactory results in its two variants, with 98% accuracy in capturing confidential data in the native variant. For the remote variant, the attack proved to be capable of capturing navigation data as a URL recovery with an error rate of 2.3%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noise modeling in power line communications has recently drawn the attention of researchers. However, when characterizing the noise process in narrowband communications, previous works have only focused on small-scale phenomena involving fine-grained details. Nevertheless, the communication link's reliability is also affected by long-term noise phenomena that might affect transfer rates at higher layers as well. This paper addresses the problem of long-term noise characterization for narrowband power line communications and provides a statistical analysis of the long-term trends affecting the noise levels. We present a statistical description of the noise process in the time and frequency domains based on real field measurements in the FCC band (10 kHz–490 kHz). The collected data comprises more than 1.8 billion samples taken from three different locations over a time period of approximately ten days. The noise samples have been statistically analyzed by considering stationarity, autocorrelation, and independence. Although our results—being unprecedented—are interesting per se, they improve the noise pattern knowledge, thus paving the way for the design and implementation of more robust PLC protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Channel coding provides numerous advantages to digital communications. One of such advantages is error correcting capabilities. This, however, comes at the expense of coding rate, which is a function of the codebook's cardinality |C| or number of coded information bits and the codeword length M. In order to achieve high coding rate, we hereby report a channel coding approach that is capable of error correction under power line communications (PLC) channel conditions, with permutation coding as the coding scheme of choice. The approach adopts the technique of unequal error correction for binary codes, but with the exception that non-binary permutation codes are employed here. As such, certain parts of the information bits are coded with permutation symbols, while transmitting other parts uncoded. Comparisons with other conventional permutation codes are presented, with the proposed scheme exhibiting a relatively competitive performance in terms of symbol error rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For polar codes, the statistical breakdown of belief propagation (BP) decoding errors is firstly proposed by Sun et al. The errors are classified into three categories: unconverged errors, false converged errors and oscillation errors, which are corrected by three different post-processing methods. As for the BP List (BPL) decoding, we discover that one type of error can be transformed to another type by different factor graphs in the failed BP decoding. Besides, false converged error is usually easier to be detected and modified. Therefore, we only target false converged error to detect and correct. In this work, we propose a two-level detection rule for false converged errors and its corresponding post-processing algorithm to modify these errors in order to improve the performance of the BPL decoding. Numerical results show that the error-correction performance of the proposed decoder is more than 0.85dB better than that of the permuted BPL (PBPL) decoder with slight extra computation complexity at the frame error rate (FER) of $10^{-5}$ for 5G (1024,512) polar code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart Grid is a new concept that seeks to articulate the electrical energy and communications systems as a unified system for the optimization of energy consumption in the world, where one of the most accepted technologies for the transmission of information in residential environments is Power Line Coomunicatios (PLC). The objective of this article is to propose a model supported by queuing theory, which allows evaluating the behavior of multiclass traffic in a HAN (Home Area Network) under the HomePlug AV (HPAV) standard, which is one of the most important standards. of PLC technology. HPAV is considered an efficient standard in hostile conditions for the transmission of information, such as occurs when transmitting through the electrical network, which is why it is very feasible the emergence of packet damming in each node that is part of the PLC network Due to the mechanisms of access to the medium and the availability of a single collision domain, affecting the performance of the network as the number of nodes increases. In view of the above, it is vitally important to have a model that allows describing the behavior that may occur within the PLC network. According to the results obtained, the proposed model allows estimating parameters such as arrival times, waiting times in queue, attention times, probability of packet loss, throughput, number of lost packets, among other values related to the performance of the net. Although the model can be considered of great help for research work related to PLC communications, it could be combined with other more advanced analysis techniques, in order to obtain more profound results and in more complex contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a theoretical study on the influence of a multi-grounded neutral on the transmission of narrowband power-line communication (PLC) signals through a two-wire medium-voltage distribution line. Three different methods are proposed to calculate the transfer function of the line in the 3–500 kHz range: (i) nodal admittance method; (ii) travelling wave method; (iii) electrically-short line approach. The validity, advantages and shortcomings of each method are presented and discussed. It is shown that improving the grounding impedance at the transmitter and receiver locations will contribute to reducing the channel attenuation. It is also shown that the number of intermediate grounding points along the neutral is more relevant for the attenuation of PLC signals than their impedance. In general, increasing such number will always reduce the attenuation in frequencies where the line is electrically short. A similar behavior is observed at the higher end of the 3–500 kHz range provided the grounding interval is less than 300 m, which is half wavelength of the 500 kHz frequency. If the separation between grounding points is greater than that, reducing the number of grounding points is likely to reduce the average channel attenuation, but at the cost of introducing multiple resonant frequencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power line communications (PLC) have been an active research area for many years and it is still the case, mainly because they present economic and technical natural advantages for a wide range of applications using the existing electrical grid as transmission medium. In this paper, the authors provide an update on PLC technologies and their applications in Smart Grids, the main challenges they are currently facing, how they can be addressed, and the current research initiatives.

A great deal of attention has been recently given to Machine Learning (ML) techniques in many different application fields. This paper provides a vision of what ML can do in Power Line Communications (PLC). We first and briefly describe classical formulations of the ML, and distinguish deterministic from statistical learning models with relevance to communications. We then discuss ML applications in PLC for each layer, namely, for characterization and modeling, for the development of physical layer algorithms, for media access control and networking. Finally, other applications of the PLC that can benefit from the usage of ML, as grid diagnostics, are analyzed. Illustrative numerical examples are reported to serve the purpose of validating the ideas and motivate future research endeavors in this stimulating signal/data processing field.

This paper provides a comprehensive discussion about the characteristics of power line communication (PLC) channels related to its synchronization with the mains period. This fact constitutes an interesting and distinguishing feature of these kind of channels. Under the mains voltage presence, the behavior of some loads connected to the power network allows representing the transmission medium as a linear periodically time varying (LPTV) system. Some components in the received noise exhibit periodicity as well, in terms of impulsive waveforms synchronized with the mains period and other cyclostationary (CS) signals. This fact has been taken into account in the design of PLC systems, for instance by defining medium access control (MAC) frames synchronized with the mains period and by adapting the modulation to the cyclic signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to improve the system performance. Hence, in PLC, it is of particular interest to describe the general relations of LPTV systems and CS signals when both have a common period, which is the purpose of this work. It is not aimed at providing new mathematical tools for the analysis of these cyclic signals and systems, which have been extensively developed over the last five decades, but to serve the readers of the PLC community more accessible mathematical relations that can be applied to the practical problems they have to face. A review of recent works dealing with the cyclic properties of PLC channels and transmission techniques aware of these strategies is included as well.

Remote monitoring of electrical cable conditions is an essential characteristic of the next-generation smart grid, which features the ability to consistently surveil and control the grid infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a technique that harnesses power line modems (PLMs) for monitoring cable health. We envisage that all or most of these PLMs have already been deployed for data communication purposes and focus on the distribution grid or neighborhood area networks in the smart grid. For such a setting, we propose a machine learning (ML)-based framework for automatic cable diagnostics by continuously monitoring the cable status to identify, assess, and locate possible degradations. As part of our technique, we also synthesize the state-of-the-art reflectometry methods within the PLMs to extract beneficial features for the effective performance of our proposed ML solution. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution under different aging conditions and varying load configurations. Finally, we reflect on our proposed diagnostics method by evaluating its robustness and comparing it with existing alternatives.

This article reviews the basis and the main aspects of the recent evolution of Broadband Power Line Communications (BB-PLC or, more commonly, BPL) technologies. The article starts describing the organizations and alliances involved in the development and evolution of BPL systems, as well as the standardization institutions working on PLC technologies. Then, a short description of the technical foundation of the recent proposed technologies and a comparison of the main specifications are presented; the regulatory activities related to the limits of emissions and immunity are also addressed. Finally, some representative applications of BPL and some selected use cases enabled by these technologies are summarized, together with the main challenges to be faced.

Digital communication over power lines is an active field of research and most studies in this field focus on low-voltage (LV) and medium-voltage (MV) power systems. Nevertheless, as power companies are starting to provide communication services and as smart-grid technologies are being incorporated into power networks, high-voltage (HV) power-line communication has become attractive. The main constraint of conventional HV power-line carrier (PLC) systems is their unfeasibility for being migrated to wideband channels, even with a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this scenario, none of the current linear/non-linear equalizers used in single carrier schemes achieve the complete compensation of the highly dispersive conditions, which limits their operation to 4 kHz channels. In this paper, a new PLC-channel model is introduced for transmission lines incorporating the effects of the coupling equipment. In addition, the use of the single-carrier frequency-division modulation (SC-FDM) is proposed as a solution to operate PLC systems in a wide bandwidth, achieving transmission speeds above those of the conventional PLC system. The results presented in this paper demonstrate the superior performance of the SC-FDM-PLC over conventional PLC systems, obtaining a higher transmission capacity in 10 to 30 times.

Since the inherent serial nature of successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding results in a long latency, belief propagation (BP) decoding for polar codes has drawn attention for high-throughput applications. However, its error correction performance is inferior to that of SCL decoding. Therefore, the bit-flipping strategy has been recently applied to BP decoding, which can approach the SCL decoding performance through multiple additional decoding attempts. The original BP flip (BPF) decoding suffers from an inaccurate identification of erroneous bits by a fixed flip set (FS), which has been improved by the generalized BPF (GBPF) decoding. In this article, the GBPF decoding is extended to support multiple bits being flipped in one decoding attempt. In addition, for two types of decoding errors: detected errors and undetected errors, we propose two novel methods to more effectively identify erroneous bits. For detected errors, the concept of loop sets is defined and a loop-based identification method is introduced based on the study of error patterns of BP decoding. On the other hand, a method to generate a more accurate fixed FS is proposed for undetected errors, which considers the bit error distribution under BP decoding. Combining the two methods, the GBPF with merged sets (GBPF-MS) decoding can achieve the SCL-8 performance and outperforms the state-of-the-art BPF, BP list, and SC flip (SCF) decoding, for polar codes with length 1024 and information rate 1/2. Implemented by 40nm CMOS technology, the proposed GBPF-MS decoder with ten flips exhibits an average throughput of 4.19 Gbps at 2.5 dB, which is $1.6\times $ and $1.72\times $ faster than the state-of-the-art SCL-4 and SCF decoders, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optical wireless communications have attracted widespread attention in the traditional power industry because of the advantages of large spectrum resources, strong confidentiality, and freedom from traditional electromagnetic interference. This paper mainly summarizes the major classification and frontier development of power industry optical wireless technologies, including the indoor and outdoor channel characteristics of power industry optical wireless communication system, modulation scheme, the performance of hybrid power line, and indoor wireless optical communications system. Furthermore, this article compares domestic and foreign experiments, analyzes parameters for instance transmission rate, and reviews different application scenarios such as power wireless optical positioning and monitoring. In addition, in view of the shortcomings of traditional power technology, optical wireless power transfer technology is proposed and combined with unmanned aerial vehicles to achieve remote communication. At last, the main challenges and possible solutions faced by power industry wireless optical technologies are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arriving at a good combination of coding and modulation schemes that can achieve good error correction constitutes a challenge in digital communication systems. In this work, we explore the combination of permutation coding (PC) and pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) for mitigating channel errors in the presence of background noise and jitter. Since PAM is characterised with bi-polar constellations, Euclidean distance is a good choice for predicting the performance of such coded modulation setup. In order to address certain challenges facing PCs, we therefore introduce injections in the coding system, together with a modified form of PAM system. This modification entails constraining the PAM constellations to the size of the codeword's symbol. The results obtained demonstrate the strength of the modified coded PAM system over the conventional PC coded PAM system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The performance of belief propagation list (BPL) decoding of polar codes is related to the selection of $L$ factor graphs (FGs), which have the least number of girths. However, the straightforward search of such FGs is of high complexity. To achieve good performance with reasonable complexity, we propose an efficient method to find FGs with the least number of length-12 loops in all permuted FGs. Since some length-12 loops have been destroyed by redundant decoding operations, the corresponding FGs can be simplified to different numbers of length-12 loops. Thanks to the proposed loop simplification (LS), BPL decoding is now based on more efficient FGs, resulting in better performance and lower average decoding latency than the state-of-the-art. Numerical results have shown that the performance improvement is 0.15 dB when frame error ratio (FER) is $10^{-4}$ , for $(1024, 512)$ codes with $L=64$. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Windowed orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and wavelet OFDM have been proposed as multicarrier techniques for broadband communications over the power line network by the standard IEEE 1901. The windowed OFDM has been extensively researched and employed in different fields of communication, while the wavelet OFDM has been recently recommended for the first time in a standard. This paper is aimed to show that the wavelet OFDM, which basically is an extended lapped transform-based multicarrier modulation (ELT-MCM), is a viable and attractive alternative for data transmission in hostile scenarios, such as in-home power line communications (PLC). To this end, we obtain theoretical expressions for ELT-MCM of: 1) the desired signal power; 2) the inter-symbol interference power; 3) the inter-carrier interference power; and 4) the noise power at the receiver side. These expressions are used to derive the throughput. This paper includes several computer simulations that show that ELT-MCM is an efficient alternative to improve data rates in the PLC systems.

Power line communication (PLC) is an attractive approach to provide information transfer services for the smart home. The PLC network inherently suffers from the severe channel fading and impulsive noise. According to the mode of impulsive and the impulsive occurrence, the PLC channel can be modeled as the channel with memory. We compute the achievable rate by employing the Markov process with a finite number of states based on the dependence among the impulsive occurrence numbers in different time slots. Furthermore, the cumulative distribution function (CDF) for the received signal-to-noise ratio is derived with the statistical characteristics of the PLC channel. This helps in obtaining the ergodic capacity and outage probability for the PLC channels. We finally present the simulation results to verify the analytical results.

AMIs (Advanced Metering Infrastructures) present an important role in Smart City environments, especially from the point of view of distribution and customers, offering control and monitoring capabilities. The use of PLC (Power Line Communication) technology offers a wide range of advantages in AMI, including not needing to deploy an additional communication infrastructure. However, the electrical network was not initially designed for communications, as these networks pose problems depending on the connected loads, such as network impedance variation, frequency selectivity or noise. For this reason, the use of simulators is proposed to facilitate the deployments based on PLC networks, and analysis and diagnosis tools for the identification of problems in operating networks are also required. This paper presents a toolkit for evaluating and analyzing the performance of PLC networks. This toolkit is composed of SimPRIME, a simulator for the evaluation of NB-PLC PRIME (PoweR line Intelligent Metering Evolution) networks’ performance; SimBPL, a simulator for the evaluation of MV-BPL (Broadband Power Line over Medium Voltage) cells’ performance; and PRIME Analytics, a forensics tool that allows diagnosis of communication problems in PRIME operational networks based on traffic traces. The toolkit has been developed throughout several research projects in close collaboration with DSOs (Distribution System Operators) and equipment manufacturers, so they provide solutions to actual problems of these industry key players and have been adapted to facilitate their use. As a result, the tools are accessible through web applications to increase their usability, portability, and scalability. These applications represent the first steps in offering PLC simulation and analysis as a service that could benefit the research community, academia, and industry.

A novel concatenated coding system for both narrowband and broadband power line communications (NB-PLC and BB-PLC) is proposed. The order of the inner and the outer codes switches from the G3-PLC standard and the interleaver is eliminated. The Error-and-erasure decoder (EED) is selected as the Reed-Solomon inner code is because the impulsive noises clearly mark the erasure positions with a threshold-based algorithm. The nonbinary convolutional outer code with vector symbol decoding (VSD) can correct longer burst errors. The results show that for BB-PLC, the bit error rate (BER) of RS (63,51) error-only (ED) with VSD is 1.5×10-5 and of EED-VSD is 9.0×10-9 at Eb /No 26 dB. For NB-PLC, the BER of ED-VSD is 7.9×10-5 and of EED-VSD is 2.2×10-8 at Eb /No 16 dB. Therefore, BER of EED-VSD is three to four orders of magnitude lower than ED-VSD. Moreover, NB-PLC reaches the desired BER around 10-7 at about 10 dB lower Eb /No than BB-PLC.