To deal with the future energy demand, there is a growing interest in adding more and more intelligence and network abilities to the electricity distribution system. To accomplish this idea, the low voltage grid could be used as an infrastructure for communications. However, the mains grid is a very hostile and harsh environment for data transmission with varying parameters in time and frequency. Therefore, agile and robust techniques are needed to guarantee reliable communications. Based on a comprehensive channel analysis, suitable modulation and coding methods are developed, and sophisticated adaption of the overall system architecture to the channel parameters is performed.

Research Objectives:

• Adaptive modulation schemes
• Optimized channel utilization
• Software-defined PLC