Open Access

Im Projekt MOBCOM wird ein neues Verfahren zur Zustandsüberwachung von elektrischen Betriebsmitteln in Niederspannungsnetzen und Anlagen entwickelt. Mittels PLC (power line communication) Technologie werden hochfrequente transiente Vorgänge auf dem Stromkanal und dessen Übertragungseigenschaften erfasst und bewertet. In dem Abschlussbericht wird ein Prototyp für Powerline-Kommunikation zur Netzüberwachung beschrieben. Der Prototyp basiert auf einem PLC-Empfänger, welcher den Kanal misst, um so Informationen über den PLC-Kanal und den aktuellen Zustand des Stromnetzes zu erhaltet. Der PLC-Empfänger verwendet das Kommunikationssignal, um eine genaue Schätzung des Stromkanals zu erhalten und liefert Informationen zur Erkennung von Teilentladungen und anderen Anomalien im Netz. Diese Überwachung des Stromnetzes macht sich die bestehende PLC-Infrastruktur zunutze und verwendet die ohnehin übertragenen Datensignale, um eine Echtzeitmessung der Kanalübertragungsfunktion und des empfangenen Rauschsignals zu erhalten. Da dieses Signal im Vergleich zu einfacheren Messsensoren mit einer hohen Abtastrate abgetastet wird, enthält es wertvolle Informationen über mögliche Beeinträchtigungen im Netz, die behoben werden müssen. Während die Kanalmessungen auf einem empfangenen PLC-Signal beruhen, können Informationen über Teilentladungen oder andere Störquellen allein durch einen PLC-Empfänger gesammelt werden, d. h. ohne eine PLC-Übertragung. Es wurde ein Prototyp auf Basis von Software Defined Radio entwickelt, der die gleichzeitige Kommunikation und Erfassung für ein Stromnetz implementiert.

We describe a prototype for power line communi- cation for grid monitoring. The PLC receiver is used to gain information about the PLC channel and the current state of the power grid. The PLC receiver uses the communication signal to obtain an accurate estimate of the current channel and provides information which can be used as a basis for further processing with the aim to detect partial discharges and other anomalies in the grid. This monitoring of the power grid takes advantage of existing PLC infrastructure and uses the data signals, which are transmitted anyway to obtain a real-time measurement of the channel transfer function and the received noise signal. Since this signal is sampled at a high sampling rate compared to simpler measurement sensors, it contains valuable information about possible degradations in the grid which need to be addressed. While channel measurements are based on a received PLC signal, information about partial discharges or other sources of interference can be gathered by a PLC receiver in the absence of a transmit signal. A prototype based on Software Defined Radio has been developed, which implements the simultaneous communication and sensing for a power grid.

The peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), commonly used to describe the amplitude variations of an OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplex) signal, does not accurately reflect its impact on the system performance. This paper applies the mutual information as a metric to assess the effects of nonlinear PAPR reduction schemes on the performance of OFDM systems. Evaluation of the achieved mutual information shows that a significant capacity loss from clipping occurs only at high SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) and a simple compression/expansion technique is proposed to achieve close to optimal performance in this regime. The effectiveness of this method is validated through WER (word error rate) simulations with several modulation and coding schemes.

Since their dawning, space communications have been among the strongest driving applications for the development of error correcting codes. Indeed, space-to-Earth telemetry (TM) links have extensively exploited advanced coding schemes, from convolutional codes to Reed-Solomon codes (also in concatenated form) and, more recently, from turbo codes to low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. The efficiency of these schemes has been extensively proved in several papers and reports. The situation is a bit different for Earth-to-space telecommand (TC) links. Space TCs must reliably convey control information as well as software patches from Earth control centers to scientific payload instruments and engineering equipment onboard (O/B) spacecraft. The success of a mission may be compromised because of an error corrupting a TC message: a detected error causing no execution or, even worse, an undetected error causing a wrong execution. This imposes strict constraints on the maximum acceptable detected and undetected error rates.

This paper presents an overview of the coding aspects of a GNSS receiver. Coding allows detection and correction of channel-induced errors at the receiver, here the focus is on the mitigation of threats from malicious interferences. Although the effects of interference at different stages of GNSS baseband processing has been deeply analyzed in the literature, little attention was devoted to its impact on the navigation message decoding stage. Theis paper provides an introduction to the various coding schemes employed by current GNSS signals, discussing their performance in the presence of noise in terms of block-error rate. Additionally, the benefits of soft-decoding schemes for navigation message decoding are highlighted when jamming interferences are present. The proposed scheme requires estimating the noise plus interference power, yielding to enhanced decoding performances under severe jamming conditions. Finally, cryptographic schemes as a means of providing anti-spoofing for geosecurity location-based services, and their potential vulnerability are discussed, with particular emphasis on the dependence on the dependence of the scheme on successful navigation message decoding