Two-way digital video transmission over medium-voltage power-lines using time-domain synchronous orthogonal frequency division multiplexing technology

This paper describes field trials of two-way digital video transmissions over a 700-m long medium-voltage power cable using a frequency division duplex scheme. The purpose is to check the feasibility of using time-domain synchronous orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (TDS-OFDM) technology in powerline communication (PLC). TDS-OFDM is the core technology in digital multimedia broadcasting-terrestrial (DMB-T), developed by Tsinghua University for digital television terrestrial multimedia broadcast applications and successfully adopted in the Chinese Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting Standard. PLC systems are widely believed to be bandwidth or data throughput limited. However, the use of known pseudo random sequences as guard intervals for synchronization and channel estimation in TDS-OFDM greatly reduces the system overhead and increases the spectrum efficiency. These experiments show that TDS-OFDM is appropriate not only for broadcasting but also for PLC applications with appropriate modifications.