Impulsive Noise Reduction in Power Line Communication MAC Protocol with Adaptive Filtering Technique Using Network Simulator-3

Power Line Communication (PLC) is one of the communication technologies that uses existing infrastructure for data transmission. Despite the potential to transmit data over power line, there exists a challenge to overcome the effects caused by the impulsive noise. There is a need for impulsive noise reduction to reduce its noise effects and increase the performance of the network. Generally, adaptive filter performs better than any other existing techniques in noise reduction. This study deals with the impulsive noise reduction using the adaptive filter. An adaptive filter using Least Mean Squares (LMS) algorithm is modelled for a PLC-MAC (Medium Access Control) network with 26 nodes using network simulator-3 (ns-3). The performance of this network without the presence of impulsive noise, with the presence of impulsive noise (without noise reduction) and with adaptive noise reduction is compared and analysed.

I. Introduction

Power Line Communication (PLC) is a ubiquitous technology which uses the existing cables for data transmission. Similar to other communication technologies, the transmitter modulates the data before transmission and injects into the power line channel. Then demodulation takes place at the receiver end [1] . PLC has been gaining attention because of its attractive applications like home automation to internet access which is called Broadband over Power Line Communication (BPL). Nowadays, the need for the number of devices to be connected to the internet is increasing. This is shown in Fig. 1 .