A novel scheme for low voltage powerline communication signal processing

Abstract The low voltage powerline communication (LVPC) has become a hot research topic for electrical advancements in the recent years. On the one hand, the powerline represents a serious threat to the telecommunication system. On the other hand, it has a number of advantages that attract great interest for the development of electrical market and business opportunities. However, the powerline communication is known as noise oriented environment. The quality of the signal transmission is strongly polluted by the omnipresent noise, heavily jammed due to a variety of loads and unpredictable effects on signal propagation. For this reason, practical implementation of the high quality transmission through the powerline remains nowadays a difficult issue. This paper aims to develop a novel scheme to deal with this problem. The proposed scheme combines the advantages of both the wavelet transform and the Wigner–Ville distribution (WVD) methods. Wavelet Transform involves good characteristics in both time and frequency localization and can give a self-adjusting time–frequency window. WVD provides high resolution in time and frequency, because it is a real energy preserving transform. These methods are powerful investigation tools for time–frequency localization and signal readability in order to detect if an observed powerline signal contains desired information. Application of the proposed scheme to the signal measured from the real LVPC system shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.