Modelling impulsive noise in indoor powerline communication systems

Powerline communication (PLC) is an emerging technology that has an important role in smart grid systems. Due to making use of existing transmission lines for communication purposes, PLC systems are subject to various noise effects. Among those, the most challenging one is the impulsive noise compared to the background and narrowband noise. In this paper, we present a comparative study on modelling the impulsive noise amplitude in indoor PLC systems by utilising several impulsive distributions. In particular, as candidate distributions, we use the symmetric alpha-Stable (S alpha S), generalised Gaussian, Bernoulli Gaussian and Student's t distribution families as well as the Middleton Class A distribution, which dominates the literature as the impulsive noise model for PLC systems. Real indoor PLC system noise measurements are investigated for the simulation studies, which show that the S alpha S distribution achieves the best modelling success when compared to the other families in terms of the statistical error criteria, especially for the tail characteristics of the measured data sets.