Emulation of AWGN for noise margin test of powerline communication systems

AWGN is a channel model with white Gaussian noise. Due to the simplicity and the tractability of the mathematical nature, this model is widely used to study the behavior of a communication system. The performance evaluation of almost all powerline communication (PLC) systems begins with the margin test against AWGN. In this paper we report the implementation of AWGN in a powerline channel emulator that is used for the performance evaluation of PLC modems. Some common methods of generating white Gaussian random numbers are investigated and implemented. A verification platform is developed to measure the quality of the generated white Gaussian noise. A comparison of the implementations is made in the consideration of the accuracy, the speed and the resource consumption. The influence of analog components such as the reconstruction filter, the clipping diode and the coupling circuits is also investigated.