Investigation on power line communication in aircrafts

Power line communication is envisaged for the future more electric aircraft and the scenario studied in this work deals with the cabin lighting system, since its tree-shaped architecture is sufficiently complicated to be representative of many other aircraft harness configurations. The statistical characteristics of the propagation channels are deduced from the measurements made on a representative test bench, the experimental values of the insertion gain being also compared with those obtained from a theoretical model based on the multiconductor transmission line theory. Field-programmable gate array-based modems have been designed and the performance of links are described and compared with predicted values deduced from a software tool simulating the link.