Abstract—In any cable or power line communications, impulse noise is known tobethe most difficult noise to filter. In particular, non periodic asynchronous impulse noise is impossible to predict. Under such noise conditions, the OFDM1 symbol generally used in PLC2 is corrupted. To overcome this problem, the signal-to-noise ratio is generally improved by detecting and/or filtering the noise. This leads however to heavy detection and computing timein compa¬rison with the disturbance duration. In this paper, we study the parameters of the noise generated by a load commutation and propose a new approach that consists in controlling the commutation instant of the load. This approach reduces by up to 15 dB the asynchronous impulsive noise emitted by a resistive load in a 40.96-µstypical Homeplug AVOFDM symbol duration. Synchronisation is integrated in electronic commutation system. Results show that the load value does not influence the magnitude of the impulse noise.

Index Terms—Commutation, impulse noise, Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) improvement, zero-crossing.

Cite:V. Guillet, G. Lamarque, P. Ravier and C. L´eger, "Improving the power line communication signal-to-noise ratio during a resistive load commutation," Journal of Communications, vol. 4, no.2, pp.126-132, 2009.