Long-Term Noise Characterization of Narrowband Power Line Communications

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive statistical analysis of long-term noise behavior in narrowband power line communications, based on extensive real-world data, to improve the design of more reliable PLC protocols.

Contribution

It offers the first detailed long-term noise characterization in the FCC band for narrowband PLC using large-scale field measurements.

Findings

Long-term noise exhibits specific statistical patterns.

Noise characteristics vary across different locations.

Results enable development of more robust PLC protocols.

Abstract

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 10 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.