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Best Readings in Power Line Communications

Introduction
Digital communications over power lines is an old idea that dates back to the early 1920s, when the
first patents were filed in this area. Since then, power utility companies have used power line
communications (PLCs) for a couple of decades for narrowband applications such as metering and
control. In the past decade, however, there has been a renewed interest in the possibility of
exploiting power line cables as a broadband communications medium. Moreover, as opposed to the
past where the focus was on low rate utility applications and broadband Internet access, todays
interests spans several important applications: indoor wired local area network (LAN) for residential
and business premises, in-vehicle data communications, smart grid applications (advanced metering
and control, peak shaving, mains monitoring, distribution automation), and other municipal
applications, such as traffic lights and lighting control, security, etc. For some of these applications,
products are already available on the market, allowing bit rates in the order of several hundreds of
megabits per second (Mb/s). Such products are specified by IEEE and ITU-T standards, of by
Industry Alliances.
The topic of PLCs is difficult as it lies at the intersection of several fields: circuit analysis,
transmission line theory, electromagnetic theory, signal processing, and communications and
information theory. It is certainly true that these considerations also apply to other (and more
conventional) communications channels such as the wireless or the telephone channel, however,
today, communications engineers have the availability of abstracted and simplified models for the
wireless and telephone channels because the initial efforts devoted to the modeling of these classical
channels date back many decades. Therefore, a shift from the electromagnetic and circuit analysis to
the communication domain has naturally occurred with time. This is not yet true for the power line
channel, whose modeling is still tied to approaches and tools of other-than-communications
disciplines, so that adequate channel models have not yet been standardized, and there is no widely
accepted channel model similar to those derived for mobile radio or telephone channels. The
consequence of this is that a solid communications and information theoretic approach to PLCs is
still lacking, and general results on the ultimate performance achievable over the power line channel
are scarce.
Most of the published papers on PLC have appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Consumer
Electronics, the IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery, the IEEE Transactions on Industry
Applications, and the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, whereas very few papers on
PLCs have appeared in publications traditionally dealing with communications problems. This

complicates bibliographic research so we believe that this Best Readings on PLC can become a
valuable bibliographical resource to those starting to work on PLCs and who find themselves with
the objective difficulty of dealing with a bibliography composed of many technical papers scattered
across a very large number of diverse journals and conferences.

List of IEEE ComSoc journals/periodicals/conferences

Magazines and Journals
IEEE ComSoc owned and co-sponsored Magazines and Journals that accept papers on PLC are:
IEEE Communications Magazine
IEEE Network
IEEE Communications Letters
IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
IEEE Transactions on Communications
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
IEEE/KICS Journal of Communications and Networks
IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid
Additional IEEE Journals that accept papers on PLC are:
Proceedings of the IEEE
IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery
IEEE Transactions on Power Apparatus and Systems
IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics
Other non-IEEE journals that accept papers on PLC are:
Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Hindawi)
European Transactions on Telecommunications (EIT)
International Journal of Electronics and Communications (AE)
Journal of Communications (Academy Publisher)
Telecommunication Systems (Springer)
Journal on Advances in Signal Processing (EURASIP)

Conferences

The premiere IEEE conference dedicated to all aspects of PLCs is the IEEE International Symposium on
Power Line Communications and Its Applications (ISPLC). This conference was started in 1997 by
communications researchers in Europe and Asia and became an IEEE ComSoc portfolio conference in
2006. ISPLC proceedings are available on Xplore starting from year 2005, and the proceedings for the
years 1997-2004 have been made available online by the IEEE ComSoc Technical Committee on Power
Line Communications (TC-PLC)

.
Main IEEE ComSoc portfolio conferences that accept papers on PLCs are listed below:
IEEE ISPLC
IEEE GLOBECOM
IEEE ICC
IEEE SmartGridComm
IEEE CCNC
IEEE OnlineGreenComm
IEEE VNC
IEEE-IEEMA INTELECT
Additional IEEE conferences that accept papers on PLCs:
IEEE Transmission and Distribution Conference and Exposition
IEEE-Workshop on Power Line Communications
IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC)
IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC)

Highlight of 2014 updates

This 2014 update is based on a redesigned template, the list of best readings has been updated and revised
when necessary, and best readings on new PLC topics were also added, e.g. EMC (with both radio and
wires), MIMO, Smart Grid, and PLC for vehicles.

List of 2014 contributors

Prof. A.J. Han Vinck (Chair) ? University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany.

Bamidele Adelbisi
Gerd Bumiller
Francisco J.Caete Corripio
Hendrik C. Ferreira
Stefano Galli
Lutz Lampe
Haniph A. Latchman
Ralf Lehnert
Anil Mengi
Riccardo Raheli
Andrea Tonello
Issued January 2015

Topics

Overview Books

Overview Papers

Special Issues

Articles of historical nature

Articles on Standards

Channel Modeling

Coupling

EM Interference

Modulation & Coding

MAC

Multiple Input Multiple Output PLC (MIMO-PLC)

Smart Grid

PLC for vehicles

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Source URL: http://www.comsoc.org/best-readings/powerline-communications