Inverse scattering for lossy electric transmission line soft fault diagnosis

For the development of reliable electric and electronic systems, a promising technology for transmission line fault diagnosis is the reflectometry, which consists in analyzing the reflection and the transmission of electric waves observed at the ends of a transmission line. For hard fault (open or short circuits) diagnosis, efficient reflectometry-based methods have been reported. However, the diagnosis of soft faults (spatially continuous variations of distributed characteristic properties) remains an open problem. Reflectometry-based soft fault diagnosis can be formulated as an inverse problem: given the reflectometry measurements made at the ends of a transmission line, what are the distributed characteristic properties of the transmission line? In this paper, the application of the inverse scattering transform (IST) to this inverse problem for lossy transmission lines is studied.