1 CHARACTERIZATION AND MODELING OF INDOOR POWER-LINE COMMUNICATION CHANNELS

As a low cost alternative, power-line communications (PLC) is expected to facilitate the remote monitoring and control of building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) devices such as inverters, heat pumps and other photovoltaic specific loads. However, communications via power lines suffer from severe multipath distortion, attenuation, noise and interference. Given this phenomenon, estimation of the frequency response of the power-line channel is necessary for any reliable PLC system. In this sense, channel estimation aids in selecting suitable carrier frequencies for communicating over power lines, an important requirement for multi-carrier modulation schemes such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). In this paper, an efficient algorithm is proposed to evaluate the channel response of any point-to-point connection in an indoor power-line network. This method will not only estimate the channel response between transmitter and receiver of the PLC system, but will also estimate the degradation in reception caused by any noise or interference sources picked up by the power-line network