A Low Complexity Multicarrier Proposal for Medium Rate Demanding Automatic Meter Reading Systems

In automatic meter reading (AMR) technology, electrical utilities (EUs) have been exploiting their own infrastructure to bill their customers in an efficient and economical way using power line communications (PLC) technologies. Since the amount of data that has to be send is quite low related to the available time to perform this task, AMR applications have been demanding low bit rates. At this moment, EUs are exploring and demanding other services as load and alarm management, remote monitoring and disconnections, etc. In this context, the low voltage PLC modems should provide more throughput while keeping the cost of the hardware low. In this paper, a low complexity multicarrier modulation is proposed in order to exploit the CENELEC A band.