Response bounds of indoor power-line communication systems with cyclostationary loads

In this paper, we estimate the responses' upper and lower bounds of indoor power lines in the presence of electrical devices showing nonlinear behavior with respect to the mains voltage. These nonlinear loads produce short-time variations that are synchronous to the mains. Nonlinearities are modeled in the frequency domain as the sum of a nominal value impedance and of a number of elementary pulse-shaped terms with uncertain weights. The indoor power-line channel is modeled in the wavelet domain and sensitivity analysis with respect to the weights is performed by the adjoint circuit method. The proposed method allows fast and accurate evaluation of the bounds of the channel's response in the time and in the frequency domain, avoiding time-consuming Monte Carlo simulations. A measurement campaign on the power-line grid of a small apartment has shown the validity of the proposed method. © 2009 IEEE.