Statistical analysis of broadband underground medium voltage channels for PLC applications

This work presents a statistical analysis performed on a set of channels that were measured in real-life underground medium voltage power line communication (PLC) networks. The aim is to improve the knowledge of the medium from experimental basis, providing usable and closed-form expressions of the main metrics in order to foster the design of PLC technologies tailored to such challenging scenario. The work targets the 2-40 MHz band, and focuses on the average channel gain (ACG), the root-mean-square delay spread (RMS-DS) and the coherence bandwidth. Furthermore, the work presents the relation between the ACG, the RMS-DS and the network topology, and it infers the capacity as a function of the transmission bandwidth under power spectral density or total power constraints. Some results about the line impedance are also shown.