An Efficient Impedance Matching Technique for Improving Narrowband Power Line Communication in Residential Smart Grids

Power line communication is a cost-effective, facile and reliable tool for the current electrical distribution grid and will play a significant role towards realizing smart grids in future. Low voltage electrical networks provide a harsh environment for data communication. Significant attenuation, noise, interferences, multipath reflections and overall unpredictable and time varying access impedance are some of the major problems faced by power line communication in its current state. The demand for smart greenhouses is rapidly increasing to meet the energy demand in future. So the need of an effective communication link between main grid and the residential grid is inevitable. This paper aims at removing one of the big hindrances in achieving power line communication, which is impedance mismatch between the communication system side and load side. Although there are many impedance matching techniques, a thorough comparison of all major techniques is required to find out which one is technically efficient and cost effective. It explains the performance variation in different system areas and therefore helps in providing better perceptive of power line communication in real applications.