Robust and Reduced-Rank UWB Receiver for Green and Smart Home Communication based on Power Line Ana Luiza S. Ferreira, Zhi Quan and Mois´ es V. Ribeiro Department of Electrical Engineering, Federal University of Juiz de Fora Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, 36036900, Brazil Email: analuiza@ieee.org,{zhi.quan, mribeiro}@engenharia.ufjf.br Abstract—The introduction of smart grids concepts into the electric power systems is pushing forward R&D activities to offer new communication technologies that are capable of dealing with the needs and demands of the electric energy sector. In this regard, this paper discusses and analyzes the performance of robust and reduced-rank based ultra wide band receiver (UWB) for low bit-rate data communication transceivers for smart and green home applications. The main advantage of the robust and reduced-rank UWB receiver is the computational complexity reduction compared with traditional ones. The simulations, based on indoor channel measurements, indicate that the performance losses due to the use of this kind of UWB receivers is lower than 2 dB and, therefore, can be handled by applying a better coding scheme. Finally, the performance of the robust reduced-rank UWB receiver can offer a good performance under impulsive noise presence. I. I NTRODUCTION Currently, there is a worldwide effort from academia, R&D institutes, and companies to make the electric power systems smart. Therefore, there is a great interest in devising telecom- munication technologies that could be able to fulfill the data communications needs and demands related to smart grids. There is a great interest in providing a suitable and reliable data communication solution for smart metering, integration metering and smart monitoring. All specified and adopted technologies (wireline and wireless) are mainly for outdoor data communications due to the demands of electric utilities. Another very challenging and interesting topic is the spec- ification and design of data communication technologies for smart home applications that characterize indoor machine-to- machine [1] communications. For this kind of application, the communication technologies must be simple, cheap, and reliable. In fact, the transceiver for smart grid communication will be part of appliances, smart electronic devices, and other equipments connected to indoor electric circuit. For short-range communication there are several candidates being considered and applied, such as narrowband PLC, Bluetooth, IEEE 802.15.4 [2], ultra wideband (UWB), GSM, and Infrared Data Association [3]. The wireless UWB technology is interesting because it features low data rate and low power consumption. However, it presents a very short range. To overcome this disadvantage, one possibility is to use the indoor electric power grid as a wireline channel for a UWB-based transceiver. In fact, the signal attenuation in a indoor PLC scenario as the frequency goes up is not considerable because the machine-to-machine distances are short and the use of relay can overcome some possible limitations regarding this aspect. However, the PLC channel is a very challenging and sometimes defined as ”horrible” because it can be time-varying, frequency selective, periodically time-varying and corrupted by impulsive noises, which are yielded by the loads connected to electric grids. This contribution aims to discuss the suitability of a robust and reduced-rank UWB receiver that presents a low com- putational complexity and can be an interesting solution for smart home application based on UWB technology over PLC channels. Computational simulations, based on indoor channel measurements, indicate that the performance losses due to the use of this kind of UWB receivers is lower than 2 dB and, therefore, can be handled by applying a better coding scheme. Finally, the performance of the robust reduced-rank UWB receiver can offer a good performance under impulsive noise presence. This work is organized as follows: Section II describes the PLC scenario, including the channel and the noise. Section III focuses on the UWB signal and the UWB PLC system under investigation. Section IV analyzes the different receiver schemes. Section V evaluates and compares the simulation performances of the different receivers. Finally, Section VI concludes the work. II. I NDOOR POWER CHANNEL CHARACTERISATION AND NOISE A. Indoor PLC Channel The PLC channel is considered to combine propagation characteristics of wireline and wireless systems because of some characteristics, such as frequency and time selective fading and presence of background and impulsive noise. To properly transmit data through this medium, the detailed knowledge of the channel profile is essential and, in this context, many studies had already focused on this subject, by showing theoretical formulations to model the channel and by presenting measured results. Following this tendency and aiming to study the Brazilian power lines, many measurements were performed at the Signal 2012 IEEE International Symposium on Power Line Communications and Its Applications 978-1-4673-0361-3/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE 218