MIMO-OFDM Scheme design for Medium Voltage Underground Cables based Power Line Communication

Abstract: Power line communication (PLC) provides intelligent electrical functions such as power quality measurement, fault surveys, and remote control of electrical network. However, most of research works have been done in low voltage (LV) scenario due to the fast development of in-home PLC. The aim of this paper is to design a MIMO-OFDM based transmission link under medium voltage (MV) underground power line channel and evaluate the performance. The MIMO channel is modeled as a modified multipath model in the presence of impulsive noise and background noise. Unlike most literatures on MIMO power line transmission, we adopt spatial multiplexing instead of diversity to increase the transmission rate in this paper. The turbo coding method originally designed for LV power line communication is used in the proposed transmission system. By comparing the BER performance of MIMO-OFDM system with and without the turbo coding, we evaluate its applicability in MV power line communication. The effect of frequency band varying on the PLC system's performance is also investigated.