EMC Regulations and Spectral Constraints for Multicarrier Modulation in PLC

This paper considers electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) aspects in the context of power line communication (PLC) systems. It offers a complete overview of both narrow band PLC and broad band PLC EMC norms. How to interpret and translate such norms and measurement procedures into typical constraints used by designers of communication systems is discussed. In particular, the constraints to the modulated signal spectrum are considered and the ability of pulse shaped OFDM (PS-OFDM), used in most of the PLC standards as IEEE P1901 and P1901.2, to fulfill them is analyzed. In addition, aiming to improve the spectrum management ability, a novel scheme named pulse shaped cyclic block filtered multitone modulation (PS-CB-FMT) is introduced and compared to PS-OFDM. It is shown that PS-CB-FMT offers better ability to fulfill the norms which translates in higher system capacity.