Advanced Signal Processing and Computational Intelligence Techniques for Power Line Communications

This is a special issue published in volume 2007 of " EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing. " All articles are open access articles distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Power line communications (PLC) is defined as data communication over power lines. The main reason to consider the medium " power line " for communication purposes is the extremely high penetration of the power distribution grid in most parts of the world. From urban to remote rural areas , power supply lines reach practically every household and thus are available as potential " carrier " of communication signals. This argument extends to buildings (homes, businesses) and mobile entities such as automobiles, ships, airplanes , or even spacecrafts, where electrical wiring enables deployment of PLC systems for internal communication. The concept of PLC is not new and has been applied by power utilities for almost a century, mainly for sending control messages over medium and high voltage lines. In the late 1990s, with the deregulation of the telecommunication and energy markets in Europe, power utilities became more seriously interested in providing additional services through their lines. However, due to unrealistically high expectations on PLC as " last-mile " solution for high-speed Internet access , together with an unclear regulatory environment, lack of standards, and underestimation of the technical difficulties , the initial enthusiasm gave way to skepticism towards the viability of PLC for fast Internet access. Today, we witness a cautious optimism regarding the future of PLC. This has several reasons. First, PLC is not only a last-mile technology but much more. While broadband In-ternet access over power lines remains an important application and current wide-scale field trials indicate commercial viability, power utilities, PLC vendors, and academic researchers are working together closely to unleash the full potential of PLC for efficient distribution-grid management and monitoring. Home networking is another major application for PLC and various consumer electronics giants are participating in the sophistication and standardization of PLC technology. Deployments of command-and-control PLC systems are expanding beyond classical home automation to, for example, lighting control in industrial premises and airfields , and other markets such as PLC for in-vehicle communication are currently explored. Second, the potentials of PLC are looked upon more realistically and the challenges of PLC are better understood. This concerns, …