Performance evaluation for medium voltage MIMO-OFDM power line communication system

Power line communication (PLC) provides intelligent electrical functions such as power quality measurement, fault surveys, and remote control of electrical network. Most of research works have been done in low voltage (LV) scenario due to the fast development of in-home PLC. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the link-level performance of a medium voltage (MV) MIMO-OFDM communication system based on transmission link under underground power line channel. The MIMO channel is modeled as a modified multipath model in the presence of impulsive noise and background noise. We first perform a measurement on the practical MV MIMO channel parameters for a section of buried cable of 1 km long in Ganzhou city, Jiangxi province, China. Based on the measured channel, we design the frame structure based on an IEEE standard for broadband over power line networks [1] to support MV MIMO-OFDM transmission. According to designed frame structure, we design an encoder and a decoder for a dual binary tail-biting turbo code and optimize some key decoder parameters for low bit error rate performance. Finally, the link-level performance for both spatial multiplexing and spatial diversity are evaluated. Numeral results show that MV MIMO-OFDM is a promising approach to provide both high data rate and link reliability for PLC.