Investigation of Narrow-Band Power-Line Carrier Communication System Performance in Rural Distribution Grids

This paper investigates error performance of the narrow-band (NB) power-line carrier (PLC) communication system from a distribution system operator (DSO) perspective, with measurement data collected in the rural 400 V distribution grid. The performance evaluation is founded on the three aspects: attenuation of the NB PLC channel, frequency of the signal to noise ratio (SNR) class occurrence detected in a receiver and bit error rate (BER) analysis. The true BER is estimated from the limited amount of collected data using error model based on Neyman type A contagious distribution, appropriate for communication channels with impulsive noise. Results confirmed that PRIME-based NB PLC deployments for smart metering applications are adequate in rural distribution grids, even in cases with high attenuation and articulated frequency variations in a PLC channel.