Detection and Localization of Load Coils from One-Port Measurements

This paper deals with detection and localization of load coils in the copper access network. The load coil is a legacy device that must be removed before deploying broadband services on twisted-pair transmission lines. The proposed methods do not require dedicated hardware but utilize the already installed transceivers for one-port measurements of the line input impedance. The number of load coils is detected by counting the number of resonance peaks in the line impedance spectrum. An approximative model of the symmetric loaded line is presented, from which a low-complexity load coil locator is derived. For nonsymmetric lines, a load coil locator using model-based optimization is proposed. The two methods are compared and evaluated by computer simulations and by laboratory measurements on real transmission lines. The estimation results indicate that up to five load coils can be robustly detected and located with the proposed methods.