Devolo (Germany)

Broadband Power Line Communications (BPL) has the potential to play a significant role in smart metering and smart grid, due to its ability to transfer data with high rate and low latency over the existing infrastructure. The current planning and design of BPL networks for smart grid is manual, experience based, time consuming, and sub-optimal. In order to automate the planning process, compare multiple scenarios, and optimize the roll-out taking into account various input criteria and constraints, a planning tool is needed. In this paper, evaluation and validation results from the field test of an BPL planning tool for smart grid networks are presented. Two network setups has been first initiated in the laboratory to validate the concept of the BPL planning tool. The BPL planning tool has been then evaluated in the field. The simulation results of the BPL planning tool were fitting with the results of the field test.

In this paper, we will present the results of a field trial based on a PLC to xDSL Dynamic Interference Mitigation (DIM) mechanism. The DIM algorithm, which has been included into the firmware of commercial in-home PLC devices, aims to improve the ability of a peaceful coexistence between PLC and xDSL systems.Further, we will present a laboratory measurement test system, which has been set up to debug and proof the concept of the DIM feature. We will look to the laboratory measurement test results, which have been studied prior rolling out the DIM enabled firmware for the field trial.The results from field study will show that xDSL lines, which are suffering from PLC signal ingress, become more stable and better performing when implementing the DIM mechanism. It will also be shown that only a small percentage of xDSL connected end-users are affected by signal ingress from PLC devices into the phone-line.

Broadband Power Line Communications (BPL) has the potential to play a significant role in the German smart grid, due to its high data rate. Although BPL may offer significant competitive benefits, the possible negative impact that BPL may have on security may be a more important factor in BPL deployment. In this paper, security issues regarding the current implementations of ITU-T G.hn BPL for access networks are discussed. It has been shown that an authentication using AES-128 on the physical layer cannot grant the authenticity. Security requirements to improve the actual situation are introduced. Furthermore, three security concepts in different complexities to adapt the key features of IEEE 802.1X into G.hn are presented. The first concept is based on the encryption of the content of the authentication messages during the handshake. The second concept extends the previous one with additional response messages. The last concept is based on the insertion of EAP-TLS authentication to validate the possession of the private keys.

In the smart grid, the G3-PLC solution is in direct competition with other IP-based communications technologies such as GPRS or DSL. In this paper, we present the devolo's 500 kHz G3-PLC access technology and it's analysis based on smart grid field trials in Germany. The focus of the analysis in this paper is concentrated on the following parameters: The influencing factor of near and far transmission throughput, the influence of a repeater on the throughput, and the influence of different UDP packet size on the throughput.

One of the new mitigation methods to improve the EMC behaviour of PLC devices is adaptive transmit power management (ATPM). This is basically the reduction of the power spectrum density (PSD) levels in case of low noise and low attenuated channels which may have PSD budget left. This paper will present results of measurements done with two possible PSD masks compliant to the new PSD levels defined in CISPR/I/301/CD [1]. The second part of the paper will make conclusions made from more than 11 million of records collected from more than 40.000 different users distributed mostly all over Western Europe. With these records containing information about real world PLC networks we can make estimations on how much we could benefit from ATPM.