Impulsive Noise Characterization of In-Vehicle Power Line

Impulsive noise can have a great influence on the performance of in-vehicle power line communication systems. Intensive noise measurements in the time domain were thus carried out on five different vehicles. Preliminary trials were first made on a stationary vehicle and the motor idling, but the characteristics of the measured low-amplitude pulses greatly vary from one car to another. We thus emphasize the characteristics of high-amplitude pulses, greater than 70 mV, observed when the vehicles were moving in traffic, during a 20-min trip. Noise is statistically characterized in terms of duration, frequency content, peak amplitude, and time interval between successive pulses. Stochastic models based on mathematical distribution functions and fitting the experimental distribution of the various pulse characteristics are proposed. It has been found that interarrival time, i.e., the time interval between two successive pulses, is rather short and would be thus the most critical parameter when optimizing the power line communication physical layer.