A broadband power line channel estimation method

During the last years there has been an ever-growing interest in power line communications in order to establish high-speed digital services such as Internet access or home networking. The design of appropriate communication systems and their evaluation in field trials call for sophisticated channel investigation methods in order to determine the complex transfer function or the impulse response, respectively. Such measurements call for sophisticated approaches, as they must be performed in presence of the power line voltage as well as the typically strong interference. This paper presents a new estimation method for power line channels based on spread spectrum stimuli. The proposed method is unbiased, which enables scalable accuracy. The performance is demonstrated by simulations as well as measurements in real-world scenarios.