A smart platform with cognitive techniques for narrowband power line communication

Power Line Communication (PLC) is becoming a strong alternative technology which enables communication on the ubiquitous electrical power supply networks. To overcome the main problem of PLC-the harsh channel characteristics, we combine the idea of Cognitive Radio (CR) and a smart SoC platform for narrowband PLC baseband processing is presented. In our platform, spectrum energy detection is made to cognize the channel condition, and accordingly the transmission parameters like the carrier frequency, modulation scheme, error codes and data rate could be adapted dynamically with good configurability to obtain best performance. Results have shown that CR scheme works efficiently and high throughput is achieved on our platform.