IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO.
3, JULY 2005
Home Network Power-Line Communication Signal
Processing Based on Wavelet Packet Analysis
Haibo He, Student Member, IEEE, Shijie Cheng, Senior Member, IEEE, Youbing Zhang, and J. Nguimbis
Abstract—Recent advances in signal processing methodologies
have spawned the way for a high-speed home network power-line
communication (PLC) system. In this paper, a novel signal pro-
cessing method based on wavelet packet analysis is proposed to
combat the adverse communication environment over power lines.
A comparison research between wavelet transform and wavelet
packet transform is presented. Since wavelet packet decomposi-
tion can provide more precise frequency resolution than wavelet
decomposition, this paper proposes to use the wavelet packet anal-
ysis to deal with the highly polluted PLC communication signal.
A hardware structure for the PLC system is presented as an ex-
perimental platform for sampling an actual communication signal.
Simulation results based on these kinds of actual communication
signals show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Index Terms—Noise, power-line communication, signal pro-
cessing, wavelet packet transform, wavelet transform.
I. INTRODUCTION
T HIS PAPER aims to develop a novel home network
power-line communication (PLC) signal processing
method based on wavelet packet analysis. The PLC system is
becoming a hot research topic and has attracted more attention
recently; however, it is still challenging for high-quality signal
transmission over such systems. The major drawbacks for the
PLC signal transmission include noise influence [1]–[3], signal
attenuation [3], [4], and multipath and reflection [5]–[7].
How to overcome the above mentioned deficiencies by ad-
vanced signal processing methods is one of the most important
research aspects in the PLC system. Reference [8] proposed an
effective solution for the PLC system based on the advanced
signal processing techniques. In this system, the multicar-
rier code-division multiple-access (MC-CDMA) systems are
employed for data transmission, and multiuser detection and
turbo decoding are used for data detection. It is reported that
the proposed system achieves nice performance to combat the
deficiencies of time-varying channel attenuation, multipath fre-
quency-selective fading, and impulse noise. Recent advances
in wavelet analysis have spawned the way for PLC signal
processing. Paper [5] proposed to use the complex wavelet
transform to deal with the signal reflection problem in PLC
Manuscript received November 26, 2003; revised April 13, 2004. Paper no.
TPWRD-00597-2003.
H. He is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, School of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701 USA
(e-mail: haibohe@bobcat.ent.ohiou.edu).
S. Cheng, Y. Zhang, and J. Nguimbis are with the Department of Electrical
Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan
430074, China (e-mail: sjcheng@mail.hust.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRD.2004.843489
0885-8977/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE
1879
systems. It is presented that by the use of phase informa-
tion obtained by complex wavelet transform, one can pick up
the useful information from the received signal. In reference
[9], a novel scheme for PLC signal processing is presented.
This scheme combined the using of wavelet transform and
the Wigner–Ville distribution (WVD) to analyze the noisy
PLC signal. This method is a powerful investigation tool for
time-frequency localization and signal readability. It can be
used to detect the desired communication information.
This paper proposed an effective method for using the wavelet
packet transform to analyze the PLC signal. Since the wavelet
transform only decomposes the approximations at each reso-
lution level to yield the approximation and detail information
at a higher level, it has the limitations in application to the
highly polluted PLC signal. However, in wavelet packet trans-
form, both the approximation and details at a certain resolution
level are further decomposed into the next level, which means
the wavelet packet transform can provide a more precise fre-
quency resolution than the wavelet transform. Simulation re-
sults and comparison research based on the actual power-line
communication signals show the effectiveness of the proposed
method.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II pro-
vides the brief background for wavelet transform analysis. Sec-
tion III presents the multiresolution analysis used in this paper;
theoretical comparison of the wavelet transform and wavelet
packet transform are discussed in this part. In Section IV, the
experimental platform for the PLC system is given. This will
provide the actual communication data for the later analysis
in Section V. In Section V, simulation results of the proposed
method are given based on the sampled data from the experi-
mental system in Section IV. Comparison of the results with the
wavelet transform is discussed to show the effectiveness of the
proposed method. Finally, the conclusion is given in Section VI.
II. WAVELET TRANSFORM
Unlike the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) with a fixed
window function, the wavelet transform involves a varied
time-frequency window and can provide good localization
property in both the time and frequency domain, which pro-
vides nice performance in analyzing highly polluted PLC
signals.
Basically, a wavelet is a function with a zero
average
(1)
1880 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 3, JULY 2005

The DWT transform is given by

(5)

Generally, we can choose and . This choice will

provide a dyadic-orthonormal wavelet transform and provide
the basis for multiresolution analysis, which will be discussed
in detail in Section III and used in the later simulation analysis.

III. MULTIRESOLUTION ANALYSIS: WAVELET

AND WAVELET PACKET

A. Wavelet Multiresolution Analysis

The multiresolution analysis is a sequence of closed linear
subspaces that satisfied the following conditions [10]:
1) with and ;
2) ;
3) , for all ;
4) is an orthonormal basis in , where
is the translates of , the scaling
function. is then called
Fig. 1. (a) Time-frequency window of STFT. (b) Time-frequency window of a scaling function for .
wavelet. For every , define to be the orthogonal complement
of in , then
The continuous wavelet transform (CWT) of a signal is
then defined as and

(2) Based on this, for any , we have the following equation:

where is called the mother wavelet, the asterisk denotes

complex conjugate, and and ( ) are the scaling (6)
(dilation) and translation parameters, respectively. The scale
parameter will decide the oscillatory frequency and the where all subspaces are orthogonal.
length of the wavelet; the translation parameter will decide Based on the multiresolution analysis, any time series
its shifting position. can be completely decomposed in terms of the approximations,
To show the advantages of the wavelet transform, Fig. 1(a) provided by scaling functions and the details, provided by
and (b) gives the time-frequency characteristic of STFT and the wavelets . The scaling function is associated with the
wavelet transform, respectively. From Fig. 1(a), we can see that low-pass filters with filter coefficients and the wavelet
the STFT has a fixed time-frequency window ( and ), function is associated with the high-pass filters with filter coeffi-
which means it is lacking flexibility. However, the wavelet trans- cients . The approximations are the low-frequency com-
form can provide varied time-frequency windows at different ponents of the time series and the details are the high-frequency
scales [Fig. 1(b)]. This enables users to choose a proper window components.
to “see” signals at different resolutions. In addition, wavelets Multiresolution analysis leads to a hierarchical and fast
are highly localized in both time-frequency domains. These are scheme. This can be implemented by a set of successive filter
the main advantages of wavelet transforms compared with the banks as shown in Fig. 2, where and are the low-pass
STFT. and high-pass filters, respectively. means the down sampling
In practical application, we will use the discrete wavelet trans- with a factor of 2. Considering the filter bank implementation
form (DWT) instead of CWT. This is implemented by using dis- in Fig. 2, the relationship of the approximations and details
crete values of the scaling parameter and translation parameter between two adjacent levels are given as [11]
. To do so, set and ( ), and we get
(7)
(3)
For a signal , we have (8)

(4) where and represent the approximation and detail

coefficients of the signal at level , respectively.
HE et al.: HOME NETWORK POWER-LINE COMMUNICATION SIGNAL PROCESSING
Fig. 2. Wavelet filter bank decomposition.
Fig. 3. Wavelet packet filter bank decomposition.
(a)
(b)
Fig. 4. (a) Wavelet decomposition. (b) Wavelet packet decomposition.
B. Wavelet Packet Analysis
The wavelet packet was introduced by Coifman and Wicker-
hauser [12] by generalizing the link between multiresolution ap-
proximation and wavelets. Simply speaking, the wavelet packet
transform is a generalization of the structure of the wavelet
transform to a full decomposition. Different from Fig. 2 for
wavelet multiresolution analysis, Fig. 3 gives the wavelet packet
filter bank decomposition method.
Based on the above analysis, Fig. 4(a) and (b) give the
comparison of a three-level wavelet decomposition and wavelet
packet decomposition. It can be seen in Fig. 4(a) that in wavelet
analysis only the approximations (represented by capital A in
the figure) at each resolution level are decomposed to yield
approximation and detail information (represented by capital D
in the figure) at a higher level. However, in the wavelet packet
1881
Fig. 5. PLC experiment configuration topology.
Fig. 6. DPFSK schematic.
analysis [Fig. 4(b)], both the approximation and details at a
certain level are further decomposed into the next level, which
means the wavelet packet analysis can provide a more precise
frequency resolution than the wavelet analysis. For this reason,
we proposed to use the wavelet packet analysis to improve
the performance of the frequency localization. This paper will
show that this kind of analysis is very efficient for dealing with
the highly polluted power-line communication signal.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL PLATFORM FOR PLC SYSTEM
In order to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed
method in this paper, a PLC platform is designed to obtain
communication data in the actual environment. The data are
sampled in different locations, such as hospitals, supermarkets,
and residential homes at different times, such as on workdays
and the weekends to reflect the different noise characteristics.
The configuration of the experimental platform is illustrated
in Fig. 5 [2], [5], [9].
Here, the discontinuous-phase frequency-shift keying
(DPFSK) is chosen for modulation in experiments. Equation
(9), shown at the bottom of the page, gives the expression of
the DPFSK output signal and Fig. 6 is the schematic of the
DPFSK as described in [2], where is called the mark (binary
1) frequency and is called the space (binary 0) frequency.
In our experiment, we make grounded for simplification.
1882
Fig. 7. (a) Same phase communication. (b) Interphase communication.
The sending and received signals are recorded by a Tektronix
scope TDS 210 series for Matlab analysis—see (9), shown at
the bottom of the page.
In Fig. 5, one thing that should raise more attention is the
so-called interphase-coupling (IPC) problem, as shown in
Fig. 7(a) and (b). It can be seen from Fig. 7(a) that if the two
communication devices (X and Y) are connected between the
same phases, such as phase A and N, the communication signal
can have a direct path from one to the other, as shown in the
Fig. 7(a) by the arrow direction. However, if these two devices
are connected at different phases, it will cause serious commu-
nication problems. As can be seen from Fig. 7(b), device X is
connected between phase A and N, while device Y is connected
between phase B and N. In this case, the only direct commu-
nication path between them is through the secondary windings
of the transformer. This will cause serious signal attenuation
problems. Reference [13] reported that for commonly used
PLC carrier frequencies, such as kHz, the resulting
signal attenuation under this situation is about 30 dB or more,
which will highly degrade the communication performance.
To overcome this communication impairment, [13] presented
a method to provide a low-loss signal path between different
phases. This is accomplished by using a simple cross phase
coupling device consisting of a high-pass filter, as illustrated in
Fig. 7(b), to provide almost no signal-loss communication path.
Furthermore, the use of an inductor (or small isolation trans-
former) and two capacitors to provide this direct communica-
tion path is also discussed in paper [13]. By providing a direct
communication path, the signal attenuation should be only 3 dB
instead of 30 dB or more. Since this paper is focused on the PLC
transmission signal analysis by the use of the advanced signal
processing method, we first investigated the topology of the
low-voltage distribution network before the experiments. Also,
the transmission distance is limited to 100 m to avoid high signal
for in the time interval when a binary "1" is being sent
for in the time interval when a binary "0" is being sent
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 3, JULY 2005
Fig. 8. "1" =100-kHz sending and received signals.
Fig. 9. FFT analysis results for signals in Fig. 5.
attenuation. A more detailed solution and discussion of the IPC
problem can be referred to in [13].
V. SIMULATION RESULT AND ANALYSIS
Based on the experimental platform proposed in Section IV,
Fig. 8 shows a communication signal sampled from the real PLC
system. Channel I represented the 100-kHz sending signal and
Channel II is the received signal after the communication net-
work. Sampling frequency is 1 MHz here.
With the modulation method described in (9) and Fig. 6, the
information of “01 010 101” is sent to the PLC system. The
time-domain received signal is given in Fig. 8 channel II. From
this, it is almost impossible to say what kind of information is
transmitted over the PLC system.
Fig. 9 shows the frequency-domain representation of the re-
ceived signal using fast Fourier transform (FFT). As one can
see from the frequency-domain representation, the energy of the
expected 100-kHz carry frequency has attenuated to a very low
value and a great deal of noise energy (especially the frequency
range between 50–80 kHz) has been presented into the received
signal after being transmitted over the PLC system.
(9)
HE et al.: HOME NETWORK POWER-LINE COMMUNICATION SIGNAL PROCESSING 1883

Fig. 10. Db10 scaling function and wavelet function.

Fig. 11. Analysis result for the received signal using Db 10 wavelet.

TABLE I
WAVELET DECOMPOSITION FOR REAL SIGNAL FREQUENCY

Fig. 12. FFT results for d information.

Based on the discussion given in Section III, a Db 10 wavelet

accurate frequency decomposition. This idea is realized as the
is chosen for the analysis here. A detailed discussion about the
following.
selection of an appropriate wavelet function can be referred to
Conduct a five-level ( ) decomposition to the received
in paper [14]. Fig. 10 gives the scaling function and wavelet
signal shown in Fig. 8. According to Fig. 4(b), the total number
function of Db10.
of the subspace in the fifth level is given by
According to the multiresolution analysis discussed in
Fig. 4(a) of Section III, for the sampling frequency of 1 MHz, (10)
the wavelet frequency decomposition for the real sampled
signal is given in Table I [9]. The initial frequency of each subspace is equal to
Fig. 11 shows the wavelet analysis result for the received (11)
signal. From Table I, the 100-kHz carry frequency belongs to
the detailed information ( space). As seen from Fig. 11, and the bandwidth of each subspace is given by
although the signal improves our analysis result to identify
the useful transmitted information, the result is still not satis- (12)
factory enough and it is still difficult to say what information is
transmitted based on detailed . where is the sampling frequency, is the decomposition level,
Now, we take information out from Fig. 11 for further anal- and is the subspace ( ).
ysis. Fig. 12 shows the FFT analysis result for information Based on this, the carry frequency (100 kHz) belongs to the
shown in Fig. 11. As seen from Fig. 12, the ratio of the carry fre- sixth subspace of the fifth decomposition level, denoted as ,
quency (100 kHz) to the noise frequency is improved compared where the subscript is the decomposition level and is the
to Fig. 9. However, there is still a great deal of noise energy, subspace as previously denoted, so
especially in the frequency range from 60 80 kHz. It can be
kHz (13)
seen from Table I that the frequency range of the wavelet de-
composition of space (corresponding to information) is Fig. 13 gives the information of the wavelet packet anal-
62.5 125 kHz, which means this frequency range covers all ysis. Fig. 14 is the FFT analysis result of the information
of the noise energy from 60 to 80 kHz. This clearly shows why shown in Fig. 13.
the wavelet decomposition used here is not satisfactory enough Comparing Figs. 12 and 14, it can be seen that the wavelet
to analyze the present PLC signal. packet analysis can eliminate most of the noise in the frequency
From the analysis given in Section III-B, it is reasonable to range from 60 to 80 kHz. This is because the wavelet packet pro-
solve this problem by use of the wavelet packet analysis for the vides more accurate frequency decomposition and the frequency
reason that the wavelet packet analysis is able to provide more range of information is 93.75 109.375 kHz. Comparing
1884
Fig. 13. Wavelet packet analysis for the receiving signal (C information).
Fig. 14. FFT analysis result of the C information in Fig. 13.
Fig. 15. "1" = 80 kHz sending and received signals.
Fig. 16. FFT analysis result of the signal in Fig. 15.
the time-domain signal shown in Figs. 11 and 13, we can see
that the wavelet packet analysis dramatically improves the anal-
ysis result. From the time-domain signal shown in Fig. 13, one
can easily identify the transmitted information which is “0101.”
In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, it
is used for another actual sampled signal in different time and
location by the experimental platform specified in Section IV.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 20, NO. 3, JULY 2005
Fig. 17. Wavelet analysis result for the received signal: d signal (62.5 
125 kHz).
Fig. 18. FFT results for signals in Fig. 17.
Fig. 19. Wavelet packet analysis result for the receiving signal The tenth
subspace of the fifth level (C 
= 78.1258 85.937 kHz).
Fig. 20. FFT analysis result for the signal in Fig. 19.
Fig. 15 gives the results. Channel II represented the 80-kHz
sending signal and Channel I is the received signal over the com-
munication network. The sampling frequency is 500 kHz here.
Fig. 16(a) and (b) is the FFT analysis result of the received
signal and sending signal shown in Fig. 15, respectively. It can
be seen from Fig. 16(a) that in the received signal, the energy
of the carry frequency (80 kHz) has been attenuated to a lower
value. Instead, much of the high-frequency noise energy, such
as 90 and 100 kHz, appeared in the received signal after the PLC
system. This makes the identification of the useful information
very difficult.
Figs. 17–20 give the results of the wavelet analysis and the
proposed wavelet packet analysis. For comparison, five levels
of decomposition for both the wavelet analysis and the wavelet
packet analysis with the Db 10 wavelet are used here.
HE et al.: HOME NETWORK POWER-LINE COMMUNICATION SIGNAL PROCESSING
Since the frequency range of the information of the
wavelet decomposition is kHz (sampling frequency
kHz), the wavelet transform is not able to eliminate
the high-frequency noise at 90 and 100 kHz, which is evident
in Figs. 17 and 18. However, from the wavelet packet analysis
result shown in Figs. 19 and 20, it can be concluded that
the result is highly improved. Since the frequency range of
the wavelet packet decomposition is from 78.125 to
85.937 kHz, it can block most of the high-frequency noise in
the range of kHz. The time-domain analysis result
shown in Fig. 19 verifies this conclusion. From Fig. 19, it is
easy to identify the transmitted signal of “1010.”
VI. CONCLUSION
Due to the inherent characteristics of the low-voltage power
line, the transmitted signal is seriously polluted for the influence
of noise, attenuation, and multipath phenomena. This paper
proposed a wavelet packet analysis method for PLC signal
processing. The reason for proposing this kind of analysis
method is that the wavelet packet decomposition provides more
precise frequency resolution than the wavelet decomposition.
Comparison research between the wavelet transform and the
wavelet packet transform based on actual sampled PLC signals
presents the effectiveness of the proposed method. So far,
the carry frequency in the experiments is limited to several
hundreds of kilohertz. For a higher frequency, such as 10 MHz,
the performance of the proposed method may depend on the
frequency. We are currently conducting extensive research on
such high frequencies for the PLC system and considering
using advanced modulation methodologies, such as orthogonal
frequency-division multiplexing, to improve the data-transmis-
sion performance. Motivated by our initial research results in
this paper, we believe that the wavelet packet transform offers
great potential as a new tool for the highly polluted PLC signal
processing, and proposes a new angle to the researchers in this
field.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank both the reviewers and editor
for their helpful comments.
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Haibo He (S’04) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees
in electrical engineering from Huazhong University
of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China,
in 1999 and 2002, respectively. He is currently pur-
suing the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Elec-
trical Engineering, School of Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science, Ohio University, Athens.
His research interests include communication and
signal processing, VLSI and integrated-circuit (IC)
design, data mining, machine learning, and intelli-
gent systems.
Shijie Cheng (M’86–SM’87) graduated from Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an,
China, in 1967, and received the Master of Engineering degree in electrical engi-
neering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan,
China, in 1981, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Univer-
sity of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada, in 1986.
Currently, he is a Full Professor at HUST. His research interests include power
system control, stability analysis of power systems, and application of AI in
power systems.
Youbin Zhang was born in Huangshi, China. He received the B.S.E. and
M.S.E. degrees in electrical engineering from Hunan University, Changsha,
China, in 1993 and 1996, respectively. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D.
degree at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan,
China.
His area of interest is power-line communication.
J. Nguimbis received the M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from
Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China, in
2000 and 2004, respectively.
Currently, he is with the Hutchinson-Dong Feng Exploring Development
Company (DFEDC), Wuhan. His areas of interest are power system control
and signal transmission.