A Review of Wireless and PLC Propagation Channel Characteristics for Smart Grid Environments

Table 2

Outline of wireless and PLC channel characteristics.

Channel param.	Wireless	Powerline
Path loss/attenuation	Highly dependent on the propagation environment of interests with extensive results reported in the literature	Dependent on the characteristics of cable used in the PLN
Time dispersion/Freq. selectivity	Governed by reflection, diffraction, and scattering	Governed by reflections mainly due to impedance discontinuities along the propagation path
Time selectivity/Freq. dispersion	Mobility of transmitter/receiver pairs or motion of surrounding objects	Impedance variations over both long and short term
Path amplitudes	Mostly assumed Rayleigh or Ricean depending on NLOS/LOS condition	Merely resembles shadowing effect in wireless channels and mostly assumed to obey log-Normal PDF
Noise	Mostly assumed AWGN, presence of impulsive noise in certain environments	More complicated noise structure: colored background noise, narrow band noise and impulsive noise very effective