Non-invasive, reflection coefficient based channel estimation on PLC systems

The major advantage of a PLC system is the unification of the communication architecture into a singular medium. In our efforts towards this unification, we propose a non-invasive, reflection coefficient based channel estimation technique over low voltage powerlines. The novel model accounts for all the parameters of the signal viz., quality, strength, attenuation etc., by simplistic inference from the measured magnetic field intensity. To validate the proposed model experimental results are conducted over real time low voltage PLC architecture. Results of the extensively measured values are compared with its respective actual conditions. We obtain an average accuracy of 97.61 %, 97.49 %, and 97.86 % for the varying frequency, load and voltage profiles, respectively. The proposed model is further compared with three existing PLC models. We attain a mean error of 2.5 % which is lower than all the existing models, thus promising a strong candidature for PLC systems.