A novel power line communication system for outdoor electric power grids

This paper outlines a novel power line communication (PLC) system that was specified, designed, and prototyped to address the features of low-voltage and outdoor Brazilian electric power grids when the frequency band between 1.7 and 50 MHz, which complies with the Brazilian regulation for broadband PLC, is considered. The proposed PLC system is constituted by a PLC base station and several PLC modems. Also, it makes use of the clustered orthogonal frequency division multiplexing scheme to divide the total frequency bandwidth into several subchannels (clusters). As a result, the maximum throughput achieved by a PLC modem is a fraction of the maximum throughput that a PLC base station can offer and, as a consequence, the computational complexity as well as hardware resource utilization demanded by a PLC modem is considerably reduced in relation to the PLC base station. Data-rate as high as 24 Mbps can be attained in each subchannel at the application level, finally, but not the least, this PLC system can be useful for smart grid communication and digital inclusion.