Field Trial of Digital Video Transmission over Medium-Voltage Powerline with Time-Domain Synchronous Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing

Technology
Jian Song, Changyong Pan, Qing Wu, and Zhixing Yang Dept. of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua National Lab of Information Science and Technolgy Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, 100084 Haitao Liu, Bingzhen Zhao, and Xiao Li Beijing ECOM Communications Technology Co., Ltd., Fu Wai Avenue, Xi Cheng District, Beijing, China, 100037
Abstract: Using Digital Multimedia Broadcast-Terrestrial (DMB-T) system from Tsinghua University, two-way (frequency division duplex) digital video transmission over medium-voltage power cables of up to 700m-long was successfully demonstrated. The preliminary experiments validate the feasibility of using Time-Domain Synchronous Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (TDS-OFDM) technology, a core technology in DMB-T and being adopted in Chinese Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting Standard, for powerline communication. TDS-OFDM offers higher spectrum efficiency as known pseudo random sequence is used as the guard interval (or frame header) and also serves the purpose of synchronization and channel estimation avoiding the overhead to put either training symbols or pilots in OFDM symbol. Key words: Powerline Communication (PLC), Time-Domain Synchronous Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (TDS-OFDM), Digital Multimedia Broadcasting-Terrestrial (DMB-T)

I. Introduction Powerline communication (PLC) uses the existing electrical power grid to provide various services to costumers. As the communication signal (with working frequency much higher than 50/60 Hz) can simply be carried by the power cable, there is no need to build up new networks and hence, saves not only investment but also time to economically provide various services to customers who receive service from utility company yet not covered by communication networks. Another advantage is the overall coverage, there is no existing network can link more customers in quite different areas than that by the electrical power networks. Therefore, it has drawn extensive research interests, especially recently thanks to the latest developments in the information technology area [1-4].

PLC system can generally be divided into two categories: Narrow band with working frequency below 150KHz and the physical layer (PL) transmission date rate of less than 1Mb/s; Broadband with working frequency of 2 ~30MHz (it can be even higher than 40MHz for some systems depending on regulation) and the PL transmission data rate is beyond 200Mb/s. Spread Spectrum and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) are two modulation techniques used in PLC systems depend on different applications, and recently announced broadband PLC standards such as HomePlug AV and Opera, all adopt OFDM technology [5-6]. In the communication area, PLC systems is one of the last mile solutions providing communication service over medium-voltage (MV, in China, ~10KV) cable; can provide high speed broadband Internet access supplementary to DSL, WiFi and cable systems; can offer home networking capability for multimedia services, as well as can be a viable solution to the smart home such as the automatic control of the appliances and the video surveillance system. In the electrical industry, PLC offers important value-added services such as automatic meter reading (AMR), remote connection and/or disconnection, energy/load management, equipment/device monitoring, and power outage notification for utility companies to enhance power grid security and improve service quality as well as the business efficiency. However, several hurdles, both non-technical and technical, are needed to be overcome to assure the large-scale deployments of PLC systems. From non-technical point of view, policy and standardization are two major issues. As PLC system will inevitably introduce interference to the existing services operated in the same band, more favorable regulations is definitely needed to lift those stringent requirements on PLC systems. Existing industrial PLC standards use same modulation technology of OFDM yet

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the rest functional blocks are quite different. The lack of universal standard makes customers hesitate to consider PLC product and buy different products of no interoperability issue instead, and makes manufacturers cautious to enter into PLC industry wondering which standard(s) to support and PLC products tend to be more expensive. Technical issues are also quite challenging. In PL, as power cable was originally design for power delivery, high frequency communication signal always incurs both large attenuation increasing with the increase of frequency, putting strong limitation on transmission length and high intensity noises decrease with the increase of frequency. Also, unlike the communication cable, quite stable and hardly interfered, PLC system is quite vulnerable to the environmental interference and different noise, hence, electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) must be addressed. In this sense, channel modeling is critical and lots of papers with very good results and insights have been published [7-8]. For higher layers effective and flexible protocols handling different services simultaneously are very important to the successful implementation of the PLC technology as the data throughput for these systems cant be very high given the limited bandwidth. Recently, we have performed two-way digital video transmission over the MV power cable using DMB-T system by Tsinghua University. In the following, we first highlight the DMB-T system focusing on TDS-OFDM, coding/modulation schemes and frame structure in Section II. We then present the fried trail results of two-way digital video transmission over the MV power cable in Section III, and conclude our paper in Section IV. II. Highlight of DMB-T System Figure 2 is the schematic diagram of the DMB-T transmitter with major functional blocks described as follows. A. Scrambler Binary PN sequence of 215-1 bit long is used to randomize the input data to facilitate the system synchronization. B. Forward error correction (FEC) code It is concatenation of outer Reed-Solomon RS (208, 188) and inner recursive systematic convolutional codes of rate 4/9, 2/3, and 8/9 (all come from puncturing the same mother code with code rate 1/2). C. Signal constellation and mapping

The FEC output is converted to nQAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation with n of the constellation points) DMB-T supports the three constellations of 64QAM, 16QAM, and 4QAM with power normalization. D. Time interleaving Convolutional interleaver is used across OFDM Signal Frames (to be defined later) with number of interleaving branches of B=52 and interleaving depth of M=0, 48, 240, and 720, respectively (corresponding to four modes from 0 to 3). The maximal overall delay of time interleaving/de-interleaving is ~0.3s. E. Frequency interleaving within 3780 symbols of each OFDM frame body This is done in each OFDM frame body (FB) which consists of 36 information symbols and 3744 data symbols. F. Hierarchical Frame structure Table I Payload in Mbps under different working modes by DMB-T Payload (Mbps) Guard Interval 125 s (1/4) 55.6 s (1/9) Constellation Scheme 16QAM 9.626 14.438 21.658 10.829 16.243 21.658 64QAM 14.438 21.658 28.877 16.243 21.658 32.486

Inner QPSK Code Rate 4/9 2/3 8/9 4/9 2/3 8/9 4.813 7.219 9.626 5.414 8.122 10.829

DMB-T system takes a hierarchical frame structure given in Figure 3. From the top to the bottom, they are Calendar Day Frame (starting from 00:00:00am each day, for example, Beijing Time), Minute Frame lasting exactly one minute, Super Frame with fixed duration of 125ms, and Signal Frame. As the fundamental block of this frame structure is Signal Frame, we will then focus on the Signal Frame construction in the following. Each Signal Frame consists of Frame Header (FH) and FB with same symbol rate of 7.56 Msps. Each FB of the Signal Frame lasts exactly 500s (37801/7.56s). FH uses PN sequence and that is why this unique baseline technology is called TDS-OFDM. FH length can be 420 and 945 symbols (the relative guard interval length of 1/9 and 1/4, respectively) to support different applications. FH is BPSK modulated with average power twice as much as that of FB. Using FH of 420 as an example, FH consists of three parts,

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pre-amble of 82, PN of 255 (m-sequence), and post-amble of 83. Both pre- and post-ambles are certain cyclic extension of PN of 255. The FH can be fixed or rotated (making each Signal Frame within same Super Frame identified exclusively). Those rotated PNs are carefully picked so that the cross-correlation between two adjacent PN sequences is minimal. The data throughput offered by DMB-T system within 8-MHz bandwidth is summarized in Table I. There is 6-bit physical layer system information (Spectrum spread with BPSK mapping) in FB to inform receiver the constellation mapping, code rate, interleaving mode, carrier mode information, and FH information. G. Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform (IDFT) of 3780 points It is conducted for the FB with sub-carrier spacing of 2 KHz and that explains why the FB duration is 500s. H. Post-baseband processing Squared root raised cosine filter with roll-off factor 0.05 is adopted to shape the baseband signal. III. Two-way Digital Video Transmission Based on DMB-T systems described above, we have built two transceivers with the transmitter central frequency of 7.56MHz and 23.56MHz, respectively and each works at 8 MHz analog bandwidth. Each transceiver has two power output levels: +13 dBmW with power-amplifier (PA) and -10dBmW without PA. Power intensity of transmitter with PA is -55dBm/Hz, well below -50 dBmW/Hz specification of HomePlug 1.0 standard, and this system wont cause noticeable interference to existing systems. This also means that as long as linearity of PA is not an issue, the transmit power can be even higher. The lab test results under AWGN channel of both carrier to noise ration (C/N) and the receiving sensitivity under the QPSK rate 4/9 mode is given in Table II. Table II. The measurement of C/N and receiving sensitivity of the transceivers under AWGN Transceiver 1 C/N Receiving Sensitivity 2.0 dB 96 dBm Transceiver 2 2.1 dB -96.3 dBm

In [9], we have reported the measurement results on MV power cable and results show that when the power cable length is less than tripled (from 400m to 1Km), the channel

attenuation is 30 dB higher, significantly limits the transmission length. For the testing purpose, other than those two cables given in [9], we also chose MV power cable of 700m with channel attenuation and noise behavior in Figure 4 for the two-way digital video transmission. It shows that the transmission attenuation is quite symmetric while the noise characteristic at each end is quite different. The experimental setup is given in Figure 5, one transceiver (TX1) uses a DVD player as video source and sends signal at the central frequency of 7.56MHz to RX2 while TR2 takes the output from a digital video and sends signal at the central frequency of 23.56MHz to RX1, respectively. For illustration purpose, we only use monitors instead of MPEG-2 bit-error-rate tester to check the transmission performance. For all three MV cables with length of 400m, 700m and, 1Km, respectively, we first turned on two transceivers simultaneously to see if two-way digital video can be achieved. The two-way video transmission of 1Km failed as noise on one side is two high (please refer to [9]) while the other two succeeded at 1/9 guard interval, 4/9 code rate, 48-symbol interleaving mode, and QAM modulation. For MV cables of 400 and 700m, we then changed modulation mapping from QAM to 64 QAM and code rate from 4/9 to 2/3 with payload data rate beyond 21.6 Mbps, the transmission is still absolutely reliable. After verifying constellation mapping could be 64QAM (the highest possible for DMB-T system), we conducted the test to see the impact of the interleaver modes. In our test, we have tried different interleaving modes and found no significant difference, i.e., long-time interleaving important for digital video broadcasting may be omitted to reduce both the memory required and the processing delay. During the entire 2-hour measurement, the system works well and no stall picture has been found. This field trial just demonstrated the feasibility of using TDS-OFDM technology for PLC systems. As all the system parameters used in the experiment are solely optimized for the broadcasting application with channel bandwidth of 8MHz, lots of works in physical and MAC layers need to be done to realize the communication applications. As technologies are pretty mature, the overall modification efforts are definitely manageable. IV. Conclusion

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Using DMB-T system adopting TDS-OFDM modulation technology designed for the broadcasting purpose, we have successfully performed two-way digital video transmissions over the MV network with the power cables of up to 700m long. Results show that more than 21.6Mbps payload throughput can be delivered at certain power margin and implementing higher constellation mapping seems necessary to carry more information bit by each subcarrier provided the channel condition is favorable. Time interleaving is not giving significant performance improvement from this test. With same guard interval, FEC coding rate, and constellation mapping, TDS-OFDM offers higher spectrum efficiency as no pilots or training symbols needed in OFDM symbol for synchronization and channel estimation. Therefore, it is an attractive modulation scheme for PLC systems of limited bandwidth. Moreover, with PN used in each OFDM symbol, the system can perform fast channel acquisition to track any changes within a short period. The current work is just concept-proof and more work in physical and MAC layers is needed to actually implement this technology into the PLC systems with satisfactory performance.

References
[1] S, Galli, et. al., Broadband is Power: Internet Access through the Power Line Network, IEEE Comm. Mag., 2003, 41(5):82-83. [2] N. Pavlidou, et. al., State of the Art and Future Trends, ibid, 2003, 41(5): 34-40. [3] H. Hrasnica, et. al., Broadband Poweline Communications-Network Design, John Weily & Sons Ltd. 2004. [4] Y. H. Ma, et. al., Performance Analysis of OFDM Systems for Broadband Power Line Communications under Impulsive Noise and Multipath Effects, IEEE Tran. On Power Delivery, 2005, 20(2): 674-682. [5] HomePlug AV Specification, Version 1.0.00, Dec. 16, 2005. [6] OPERA SPECIFICATION - Part 1: TECHNOLOGY, Version 1.0, Jan. 31, 2006. [7] S. Barmada, et. al., Innovative Model for Time-Varying Power Line Communication Channel Response Evaluation, IEEE J. SAC, 2006, 24(7): 1317-1326. [8] T. Sartenaer, et. al., Deterministic Modeling of the (Shielded) Outdoor Power Line Channel Based on the Multiconductor Transmission Line Equations, ibid, 2006, 24(7): 1277-1291. [9] H. Liu, et. al., Channel Study for Medium-voltage Power Network, 2006 IEEE International Symposium on PowerLine Communications and its Applications, 2006, P.245-250, Florida, USA.

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Figure 1. Difference between CP-OFDM and TDS-OFDM symbol in time domain.

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Figure 2. The transmission system diagram for DMB-T.

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Figure 3. The frame structure of DMB-T system.

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(a) (b) Figure 4 The characteristics of attenuation of two transmission directions (a) and noise at each end of the transmission (b) for the 700m-long MV power cable.

Figure 5 The experimental setup to two-way digital video transmission over MV powerline.

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