Experimental Performance Analysis of Power Line Telecommunication Modem for Indoor Applications

The power line telecommunication (PLT) technology offers cheap and fast ways for providing in-home broadband services and Local Area Networking. Its main advantage is due to the possibility of using the pre-existing electrical grid as communication channel. Nevertheless, technical challenges arise from the difficulty of operating on a hostile medium, not designed for communication purposes and characterized by complex channel modeling and time-varying response. Practical problems for designers and testers rise also from the performance measurement phase which is not yet standardized and could be very complex and time consuming if developed with an exhaustive approach. In this paper we propose a methodological approach useful for designing an efficient test bed for PLT modems and for reducing the number of experiments. It is based on the realization of a reconfigurable grid on which real disturbing loads are connected, and on the implementation of a Design of Experiment (DoE) technique.