Design Tradeoffs in Joint Powerline and Wireless Transmission for Smart Grid Communications

Providing reliable smart grid communication from customers to the local utility faces significant challenges due to noise, interference, frequency selectivity, path loss and fading. For transmission over narrowband powerline channels (3-500 kHz) and unlicensed wireless channels (902-928 MHz), this paper reviews previous approaches for (a) channel modeling and estimation and (b) noise/interference modeling and mitigation. Based on these approaches, the paper reviews methods for joint transmission over the powerline and wireless channels to improve reliability further. The key contribution of this paper is to explore design tradeoffs in communication performance vs. implementation complexity for joint transmission.