Field Trial of Digital Video Transmission over Medium-Voltage Powerline with Time-Domain Synchronous Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Technology

Using Digital Multimedia Broadcast-Terrestrial (DMB-T) system from Tsinghua University, two-way (frequency division duplex) digital video transmission over medium-voltage power cables of up to 700 m-long was successfully demonstrated. The preliminary experiments validate the feasibility of using Time-Domain Synchronous Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (TDS-OFDM) technology, a core technology in DMB-T and being adopted in Chinese Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting Standard, for powerline communication. TDS-OFDM offers higher spectrum efficiency as known pseudo random sequence is used as the guard interval (or frame header) and also serves the purpose of synchronization and channel estimation avoiding the overhead to put either training symbols or pilots in OFDM symbol.