Flexible platform for coding evaluation in narrowband power line communication

Power line communications (PLC) represent a key part of smart grid techonologies. PLC provides a bidirectional, secure, decentralized and cost-effective communication infrastructure to interconnect and control the grid, and also, devices connected to it. Moreover, it is fairly well known that power lines were not designed to transmit information. PLC signals coexist in the medium with different kind of colored and impulsive noises, so, the complexity to achieve high bit rates and low error transmissions are really important. In this paper it is proposed the use of Complementary Sequences to encode transmited data in order to improve the quality and accuracy of the communication. This is done through the implementation of a bidirectional narrowband PLC system designed to transmit encoded information over low voltage networks. Experimental results are conformed by transmissions along more than 100 meters of a university laboratory network, which clearly demonstrates the benefits of the codification process. The main control of the system is carried out by two independent Spartan 6 FPGAs.