Professor Brian Evans gave a keynote talk at the International Conference on Communications and Information Technology on June 20, 2013, in Beirut, Lebanon, titled 'Smart Grid Communications.' Smart Grid systems intelligently monitor and control energy flows in order to improve efficiency and reliability of power delivery. Applying customer usage data transmitted once or even several times per minute, a local utility could adjust power generation and energy distribution accordingly. Smart meter communication over power lines is attractive because it uses existing infrastructure. However, it is limited by the strong impulsive noise, especially from power electronics and wireless signals, within the 3-500 kHz transmission band. One wayto improve reliability of smart meter power line communication (PLC), is to derive impulsive noise models using field measurements, and use these to develop receiver methods to mitigate the noise. Evans and his group have implemented such a strategy in their real time test bed. Moreover, one of their impulsive noise models has been adopted by the IEEE 1901.2 PLC standard.These receiver methods demonstrate up to 10 dB of SNR gain, or equivalently up to a four times increase in bit rate for the same bit error rate. This research was supported by WNCG affiliate National Instruments, as well as the Semiconductor Research Corporation. The slides for the talk are available here. Dr. Brian L. Evansis a professor with WNCG, and he is the Engineering Foundation Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Evans research bridges the gap between signal processing theory and embedded real-time implementation in the application spaces of digital communications and digital image/video processing. His current research includes interference mitigation algorithms for wireless communication systems, power line communication system test beds for enabling smart power grids, video display algorithms for cell phones, and design automation tools for multicore embedded systems.
