Real-time testbed for diversity in powerline and wireless smart grid communications

Abstract

Two-way communication is a key feature in a smart grid. It is enabled by either powerline communication or wireless communication technologies. Utilizing both technologies can potentially enhance communication reliability, and many diversity combining schemes have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a flexible real-time testbed to evaluate diversity combining schemes over physical channels. The testbed provides essential parts of physical layers on which both powerline and wireless communications operate. The contributions of this paper are 1) design and implementation of a real-time testbed for diversity of simultaneous powerline and wireless communications, 2) release of the setup information and complete source code for the testbed, and 3) performance evaluation of maximal ratio combining (MRC) on the testbed. As initial results, we show that performance of MRC from measurements obtained on the testbed over physical channels is very close to that in simulations in various test cases under a controlled laboratory environment.