Interference mitigation techniques for narrowband powerline smart grid communications

Narrowband cyclostationary interference severely limits the performance of power line communications (PLC) on low-voltage in the [3-500] kHz frequency band. For the IEEE 1901.2 narrowband PLC standard system parameters, this interference is not sparse in the time or the frequency domains making recently-proposed sparse interference mitigation techniques ineffective. In this paper, we investigate other properties of the interference; namely, its cyclostationarity and high spatial correlation across the three output phases to design effective and practical interference mitigation algorithms. The cyclostationarity is exploited to accurately estimate the interference´s power spectral density in each of its three temporal regions and use it to enhance the Viterbi and/or Reed-Solomon decoder performance. The high spatial correlation is exploited to mitigate interference effects through cancellation or erasure decoding. Simulation results show considerable performance gains for both techniques.