Analysis of the periodic noise on in-vehicle broadband power line channels

Impulsive noise is probably the most harmful disturbance existing in the in-vehicle PLC scenario. Studies performed up to now have provided statistics of their pulse width, amplitude, bandwidth and interarrival time. However, they have disregarded the periodic behavior of most of them. In addition, their accuracy is strongly limited by the amplitude of the remaining noise terms. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the periodic noise terms (impulsive or not) that appear on in-vehicle power line channels in the band up to 25 MHz. The employed methodology detects and estimates their parameters even when their amplitude is much smaller than the one of the remaining noise components. This is carried out by exploring the harmonically related peaks that appear in the power spectral density when periodic noise terms are present.