Response Bounds of Indoor Power-Line Communication Systems With Cyclostationary Loads

In this paper, we estimate the responses’ upper and lower bounds of indoor power lines in the presence of electrical de- vices showing nonlinear behavior with respect to the mains voltage. These nonlinear loads produce short-time variations that are syn- chronous to the mains. Nonlinearities are modeled in the frequency domain as the sum of a nominal value impedance and of a number of elementary pulse-shaped terms with uncertain weights. The in- door power-line channel is modeled in the wavelet domain and sen- sitivity analysis with respect to the weights is performed by the adjoint circuit method. The proposed method allows fast and ac- curate evaluation of the bounds of the channel’s response in the time and in the frequency domain, avoiding time-consuming Monte Carlo simulations. A measurement campaign on the power-line grid of a small apartment has shown the validity of the proposed method.