Time of arrival estimation in power line communication systems for home smart grids

This paper deals with time synchronization of devices attached to a smart grid, whose accuracy tightly depends on the accurate estimation of the Time of Arrival (ToA) of the synchronization related messages sent over the power line communication systems. Usually smart grids are quite complex “systems of heterogeneous systems”: the aim of this paper is to suggest a ToA detection mechanism that can use to forward time synchronization to the “last mile” link and inside the end user home. In particular in this paper, the use of a chirp-based preamble, borrowed from wireless communications (which suffer from multipath and noise like in power line communication) is proposed and tested by means of simulations and real experiments with narrowband PRIME technology. The results show very interesting performance even with narrowband chirps: the standard deviation of the ToA estimation is always in the order of 150 ns, even with loaded electrical grids.