Impedance, attenuation and noise measurements for power line communication

Abstract

With becoming a complex structure of the electricity network, smart grid architecture and technologies became very important. The most widespread smart grid technology is PLC for managing and controlling the devices in the electricity network. To design a reliable PLC device is not a straightforward issue, especially channel characteristics must be known such as impedance, noise level and attenuation. In order to understand the channel characteristics of the network, impedance, noise level and attenuations of the channel/network were measured with the given methodologies for all phases of the electricity network separately and the results are drawn. This study will be very helpful to those who want to design a device for power line communication applications.