Modelling power line communication using network simulator-3

Power line communications (PLC) plays an important role in the blend of communication technologies considered for enabling the smart grid vision. However, different from, e.g., wireless communications, for which ready-to-use modules are included in several simulation packages, there are no freely available software tools to simulate PLC networks. In particular, software modules which emulate the PLC channel are needed to capture the specifics of PLC in a communication network simulation. In this paper, we aim at closing this gap and present a PLC channel simulator written using the network simulator-3 (ns-3) library and made available for free use.