Tuesday, January 18, 2005 commentary: |
Conditioned power lines allow data transfer far faster than
DSLPower lines are “an omni-present national treasure waiting
to be tapped” for high-speed Internet delivery, says a Penn State
professor, heading a team that has developed a system for using the
overhead lines. He estimates the lines can handle data transfer at
speeds far in excess of DSL or cable, the speed of current trials
elsewhere in the U.S. The Penn State team conditioned its lines
through impedance-matching and achieved speeds close to 1
gigabit.
News summary: Source: http://live.psu.edu/story/9603
- Penn State engineers have developed a new model for high-speed
broadband transmissions over U.S. overhead electric power lines
and estimate that, at full data rate handling capacity, the lines
can provide bit rates that far exceed DSL or cable over similar
spans.
- Mohsen Kavehrad, the W. L. Weiss professor of electrical
engineering and director of the Center for Information and
Communications Technology Research, led the investigation.
- He says, "Although broadband power line (BPL) service trials
are now underway on a limited basis in some locations in the U.S.,
these trials run at DSL- comparable rates of 2 or 3 megabits per
second.
- "We've run a computer simulation with our new power line model
and found that, under ideal conditions, the maximum achievable bit
rate was close to a gigabit per second per kilometer on an
overhead medium voltage unshielded U.S. electric power line that
has been properly conditioned through impedance matching.
- The gigabit can be shared by a half dozen homes in a
neighborhood to provide rates in the hundreds of megabits per
second range, much higher than DSL and even cable."
- Their paper is titled, "Transmission Channel Model and
Capacity of Overhead Multi-conductor Medium-Voltage Power-lines
for Broadband Communications."
- The authors are Pouyan Amirshahi, a doctoral candidate in
electrical engineering, and Kavehrad.
- In their paper, the authors note that the junctions and
branches in the U.S. overhead electrical grid
cause broadband signals to reflect and produce multipath-like
effects on these lines.
- This causes degradation in power-line broadband transmission
performance and decreases transmission capacity.
- Kavehrad explains, "The signal can bounce back and forth in
the lines if there is no proper impedance matching.
- The bouncing takes energy away from the signal and the loss is
reflected in the ultimate capacity.
- "In service, performance will depend on how close the power
company chooses to place the repeaters," he adds.
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