Simulation of Power Line Communication using ATP-EMTP and MATLAB

In this paper, a simulation test bed for narrowband Power Line Communications (PLC) is demonstrated. The method is able to quickly assess the performance of modulation schemes for an arbitrary network constructed in the ATP-EMTP software, both for point to point and for multi-point to point communication. Demodulation is carried out in MATLAB. The test setup is used to implement Orthogonal Division Multiplexing (OFDM) on a number of ` typical' medium voltage (MV) distribution networks. The simulation results show that with a considered choice of OFDM parameter values, robust, real time communication over the narrowband PLC channel is possible.