Measurement and characterization of aircraft PLC channels

Abstract

This dissertation aims to discuss the characterization of the flight test aircraft power line channels related to the 28 Vdc electric power grids designed to supply energy to the in-strumentation equipments. For characterizing these channels, a measurement campaign was carried out aboard an aircraft and two data communication configurations of power lines were taken into account. While one represents a typical aircraft tree-shape topology of cable bundles, the second one is a proposal aiming at compensating the common-mode problems by reducing the multipath effects. In the light of aeronautic standard RTCA/DO-160G, analyses of measured power line communication (PLC) channels in terms of average channel gain, root mean square - delay spread, coherence time, coher-ence bandwidth, and channel capacity gives some directions to design novel generations of PLC technology for aircraft applications. Regarding the measured additive noises, anal-yses based on power spectral density and evaluated statistic information are addressed. Moreover, symmetric statistical distributions are considered to model the measured addi-tive noise. In addition, parameters of impulsive presence in the measured additive noise are discussed, and analysis of the access impedance shows some important characteristics of typical power lines used to supply energy to instrumentation equipments in a flight test aircraft. Finally, a comparison with the Brazilian in-home PLC channels shows that the PLC technology on-the-shelf (designed for in-home PLC) is also useful for aircraft applications.