PLC and RF Communications Evaluation For Smart Grid Application In Rural Configuration

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance of Narrowband power line communication (NB-PLC) and radio frequency (RF) technologies under rural environment for smart metering application. It addresses the environment influence on these two links using different modulation sizes (BPSK, QPSK, and 16 QAM) for a Smart Grid implementation. Computational simulations based on physical layers of IEEE 1901.2 and IEEE 802.15.4g standards selected for PLC and Wireless channel models show that in rural environment categorized as low density area with very low number of loads and almost no obstacles, RF with BPSK modulation shows higher performance for given SNR value, it performs a gain of 7dB that can be reached compared to PLC link.