A study on access impedance for vehicular power line communications

In this paper, we present an experimental study of access impedance for vehicular power line communications (VPLC). This study aims to provide better understanding of the effects of the vehicle loads on the impedance of the VPLC plug-in access nodes. Also, some insights for the design of adaptive impedance matching are provided. We report impedance measurements of various loads and car battery, which combined with input impedance measurements from a specific sport car are used to calculate an equivalent access impedance of a PLC device connected in parallel. We show how the inductive nature of the loads dominates the overall access impedance making it on one hand more attractive for transmission in the high MHz range, and on the other more challenging for the implementation of impedance matching.