Interference mitigation techniques for narrowband powerline smart grid communications

Abstract

Narrowband cyclostationary interference severely limits the performance of power line communications (PLC) on low-voltage in the [3-500] kHz frequency band. For the IEEE 1901.2 narrowband PLC standard system parameters, this interference is not sparse in the time or the frequency domains making recently-proposed sparse interference mitigation techniques ineffective. In this paper, we investigate other properties of the interference; namely, its cyclostationarity and high spatial correlation across the three output phases to design effective and practical interference mitigation algorithms. The cyclostationarity is exploited to accurately estimate the interference's power spectral density in each of its three temporal regions and use it to enhance the Viterbi and/or Reed-Solomon decoder performance. The high spatial correlation is exploited to mitigate interference effects through cancellation or erasure decoding. Simulation results show considerable performance gains for both techniques.