Spectrum notching and interference avoidance for power line communications

Recently, there has been considerable interest to utilize the power line infrastructure for broadband communications. Power Line Communications (PLC) operate in the frequency range between 1.8MHz to 30MHz defined by the IEEE 1901 standard. Within this frequency range, a number of organizations and users occupy their own specific spectrum. As a result, spectrum notching and interference avoidance need to be applied to enable co-existence between the primary users and secondary PLC transmissions. Instead of employing a notch filter, this paper presents an effective spectrum notching technique to provide multiple deep notches in the PLC band. The performance and complexity of this notching technique is investigated.