editorial power-line communications: smart grid

Hindawi Publishing CorporationJournal of Electrical and Computer EngineeringVolume 2013, Article ID 948598, 2 pageshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/948598

EditorialPower-Line Communications: Smart Grid,Transmission, and Propagation

Justinian Anatory,1 Moises V. Ribeiro,2 Andrea M. Tonello,3 and Ahmed Zeddam4

1 School of Informatics, College of Informatics and Virtual Education, University of Dodoma, P.O. Box 490, Dodoma, Tanzania2 Electrical Engineering Department, Faculdade de Engenharia, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Campus Universitario,36 033 330 Juiz de Fora, MG, Brazil

3Wireless and Power Line Communications Lab, Universita di Udine, 33100 Udine, Italy4 France Telecom, Orange Labs, 2, Avenue Pierre Marzin, 22 307 Lannion Cedex, France

Correspondence should be addressed to Justinian Anatory; [email protected]

Received 28 January 2013; Accepted 28 January 2013

Copyright © 2013 Justinian Anatory et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons AttributionLicense, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properlycited.

Power-line communication networks are gaining popularityin various service provisions such as in houses/offices, accessnetworks, in ships, aircrafts, trains, vehicles, in industrysystems control, and advanced metering infrastructure. Thispopularity is also striding towards smart grid implemen-tations. However, the network structure affects the chan-nel response which exhibits frequency selectivity and timevariant behavior. These effects are due to different terminalloads connected to such systems, number of branches, anddifferent branched line lengths. In addition, different types ofcables and signal injection methods used (i.e., with respectto adjacent lines/grounds and the grounding systems imple-mented in different countries) for such systems render thepropagation difficult. Furthermore, Electromagnetic Com-patibility (EMC) issues and more especially ElectromagneticInterference (EMI) occurring at different frequencies ofoperations still need more investigation. Power-line com-munications have demonstrated the acceptance to supportvarious applications such asHDTelevision (HDTV), InternetProtocol Television (IPTV), interactive gaming, whole-homeaudio, security monitoring, and Smart Grid management.These services have to be supported by the new home net-works/access and be deployed and standardized worldwide.

This special issue was launched to gather state-of-the-art research contributions in the field of Power-linecommunications. It has attracted the submissions of manyhigh-quality papers. After going through a conscientious

peer-review process, six papers have been selected. Thesepapers make an inspiring ensemble with a topic spectrumranging from improved maximum likelihood detection ofspread frequency shift keying (S-FSK) in PLC automaticmeter reading (AMR), radiation mitigation for PLC, optimalreceiver impedance design for SNR maximization in broad-band PLC, PLC for Smart Grid applications, improvements ofG3-PLC technology for Smart-Home/Building applications,and finally an overview of the HomePlug AV2 technology.

Specifically, in the paper entitled “Improved maximumlikelihood S-FSK receiver for PLC modem in AMR,” Bali andRebai present an optimized software implementation of anarrow band Power-line modem.Themodem is a node in anautomatic meter reading (AMR) system which is compliantto the IEC 61334-5-1 profile and operates in the CENELEC-A band. Because of the hostile communication channel, anew design approach is carried out for an S-FSK demodulatorcapable of providing lower bit error rate (BER) than standardspecifications. The best compromise between efficiency andarchitecture complexity is investigated. Some implementa-tion results are presented to show that a communicationthroughput of 9.6 kbps is reachable with the designed S-FSKmodem.

In the paper entitled “Radiation mitigation for Power-linecommunications using time reversal,” Mescco et al. explain theuse of the Time Reversal (TR) technique to mitigate radi-ated emissions from PLC systems. The method was probed

2 Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering

experimentally in real electrical networks with excellentresults: in 40% of the observations, the electromagneticinterference generated by PLC transmission can be reducedby more than 3 dB, and this EMI mitigation factor mayincrease to more than 10 dB in particular configurations.The paper proposes also future research directions in thefield of wired TR techniques at higher frequencies and onother media, such as Digital Subscriber Line twisted pairs. Inaddition, optimal protocols are suggested for development ofpractical implementation of TR in future standards.

In the paper entitled “A study on the optimal receiverimpedance for SNR maximization in broadband PLC,” Anto-niali et al. present the design of the front-end receiver forbroadband Power-line communications. The paper focuseson the design of the input impedance that maximizes thesignal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver. The authorsshow that the amplitude, rather than the power, of thereceived signal is important for communication purposes.Furthermore, they analyse the receiver impedance impact onthe amplitude of the noise term for which a novel modeldescription is provided. Performance results are reported forreal in-home grids that have been assessed with experimentalmeasurements. The best attainable performance is studiedwhen the optimal receiver impedance is used and it is shownthat conventional power matching is suboptimal with respectto the proposed impedance design approach in terms ofachievable information rate.

Two other papers deal with the topic of Smart Gridin various environments. In the paper entitled “Power-line communications for Smart Grid applications,” Bergeret al., surveys PLC technologies that are relevant in thecontext of Smart Grid.The specifications of G3-PLC, PRIME,HomePlug Green Phy, HomePlug AV2, as well as thestandards IEEE 1901/1901.2, and ITU-T G.hn/G.hnem arediscussed. Another paper entitled “Enhancements of G3-PLCtechnology for Smart-Home/Building applications,” by Di Bertet al., consider the in-home/building scenario, for whicha convergent network architecture is proposed to enhancethe performance of the narrow band G3-PLC technologythrough its integration with an Ethernet-based network. Thepaper defines the protocols implemented by the networkmodules. Since Ethernet represents a convergent standard formany communication devices, by adding this functionality toG3-PLC, interconnectivity with other heterogeneous nodescan be offered. Furthermore, since the G3-PLC mediumaccess control layer is based on a Carrier Sense MultipleAccess (CSMA) scheme, its performance decreases whenthe number of network nodes contending for the channelincreases. Therefore, the paper evaluates the network per-formance when an optimized time division multiple accessscheme is adopted showing that performance improvementsare reached.

In the paper entitled “An overview of the HomePlug AV2technology,” Yonge et al. provide an overviewof theHomePlugAV2 system architecture and the key features at both thePHY andMAC layers.The paper presents the new techniquesused at the PHY layer as multiple-input multiple-outputtransmission, beamforming and precoding, adaptation of theparameters, and power management for improved EMC.

Enhancements at the MAC layer are also discussed and theyinclude the implementation of power savingmodes, the usageof a short delimiter in the MAC frame, delayed acknowl-edgment, and the coexistence mechanisms with other PLCsystems. The HomePlug AV2 performance is also assessed,through simulations reproducing real home scenarios.

We believe that the papers appearing in this special issueprovide a good contribution and representation of significantresearch topics in the field of PLC.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the authors for their contributionsand the reviewers for their competent and timely work.

Justinian AnatoryMoises V. Ribeiro

Andrea M. TonelloAhmed Zeddam

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