Performance evaluation of PRIME in smart grid

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of a popular narrow band power line communication (PLC) solution (referred to as PoweRline Intelligent Metering Evolution or PRIME) for smart grid applications in an impulsive noise environment. To this end, we analyze the effects of the impulsive noise in narrow band PLC systems and derive an explicit formula of bit error rate (BER) and its upper bound for an uncoded and coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) schemes in PRIME, respectively. Our analyses and the upper bound are then validated using simulation. Furthermore, we propose an efficient time domain interleaver (TDI) technique to improve the performance of the PRIME by spreading the effect of impulsive bursts over a large number of OFDM symbols. Our simulation results show that the TDI method significantly reduces the impact of impulsive noises on the BER of the PRIME solution.