A Channel Simulator for Indoor Power-line Communications

In this paper, a simulator for indoor power-line channels is presented. Its behavioral model includes both the long-and short-time variation of the channel. The long-time variation is due to the electrical appliances switching and is modeled in a statistical way. The cyclic short-time variation is related to the presence of the mains voltage and is characterized modeling the channel response as a linear periodically time-variant (LPTV) system and including an additive cyclostationary noise term. The cyclic model is simplified by using a slow variation approach, so that the channel can be modeled by means of a cyclic sequence of LTI systems with stationary noise terms. Channels according to the behavioral model are generated based on the physical structure of the network. The model for this physical structure comprises: the wiring, characterized as a set of terminated transmission lines connected in a tree-like fashion; and the electrical appliances, which are modeled as electric bipoles acting as impedances and noise sources. The simulator can perform the calculation of the channel frequency response and noise power spectral density at the receiver given a network topology. Afterwards, a channel simulation can be carried out using two banks of filters, one for the LPTV channel response and the other to obtain cyclostationary noise by filtering AWGN. Some test results for the channel generation and simulation are presented, and practical applications of this simulator are discussed.