Dynamic Characterization and Equalization of a Power Line Communication Channel

Abstract

Power Line Communication (PLC) systems need signal processing algorithms in order to recover the transmitted signals from the high degrading medium. In the literature exist some techniques that work on the basis of a constant, known channel, but it was demonstrated that the PLC channel is time variant, therefore these techniques lose efficiency. This work presents a dynamic equalization algorithm computed in the time domain, where the channel characterization is done by a recursive least squares algorithm using the transmitted data as reference. The proposal was tested with simulations and was statistically validated using in time variant PLC channel models, obtaining a lower error rate than other methods.