BUILDING INTEGRATED PHOTOVOLTAIC COMMUNICATIONS USING THE POWER-LINE ENVIRONMENT

The focus of this research is to develop an appropriate communications phyiscal layer for building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) systems. The ubiquitous power line is a logical choice because of its common availability in all forseeable buildings designated for PV power. For power-line communications (PLC), there has been recent interest in more modern spread spectrum technologies such as Ergodic Chaotic Parameter Modulation (ECPM) and Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS). Due the spreading nature of the transmitted signal, spread spectrum modulation techniques are resistant to two major problems with power-line channels: multipath distortion and external interference in the form of narrowband noise. To improve DSSS receiver performance, previous studies have proposed various pre-filtering techniques to alleviate the effects of the narrowband noise. For this type of noise suppression, linear prediction (LP) filters based on autoregressive modeling have been suggested due to their ability to perform in a non-stationary environment. In the case of ECPM, susceptibility to noise in narrowband form has not been thoroughly investigated and its impact on this modulation technique is not clear. In this PLC study, the performance degradation of narrowband noise for DSSS and ECPM PLC is investigated and the viability of LP filtering for improved PLC performance is assessed. I