Real-time testbed for simultaneous powerline and wireless smart grid communications

Two-way communication is a key feature in a smart grid. It is enabled by either powerline communication (PLC) or wireless communication technologies. Utilizing both technologies can potentially enhance communication reliability, and many diversity combining schemes have been proposed. However, their assumptions may break under realistic conditions. In this paper, we propose a flexible real-time testbed to evaluate various diversity combining schemes over physical channels. The contributions of this paper are 1) a real-time testbed for simultaneous powerline and wireless communications, and (2) evaluation in the testbed of maximal ratio combining of the received powerline and wireless signals.