Investigation Of Interference In The Coexistence Between 4th Generation And Broadband Over Power Line

ABSTRACT

Communication is the basis of all human interactions in the world. Thus, human beings have been struggling for years to introduce different communication transmission technologies. Lately, the two technologies namely Broadband over Power Line (BPL) and 4 th Generation/Long Term Evolution (4G/LTE) have been trending topics. Many researchers have been researching these technologies from different angles to make them better for use. There is a co-existence between BPL and LTE technologies. However, the BPL radiations tend to interfere with the LTE signal reception. The study was employed in an outdoor environment whereby both technologies were subjected to co-exist in the same area. It was done using medium voltage BPL because in BPL, medium voltage is used in an outdoor environment and Low voltage in an indoor environment. This set up was implemented by using MATLAB simulator. This study was done in three phases: the first phase was to study the number of radiations produced by BPL at different medium voltage power lines in access BPL; the second was to investigate how the radiation produced by the BPL affects the LTE, which was carried out by observing the throughput received and Signal to Noise Ratio SNR; And the last phase was to propose the mitigation technique which can be used to minimize the effect of the co-existence of these two technologies. The results show that the radiation produced was increasing as the voltage increased with respect to power line lengths. The co-existence shows that the throughput decreased by a range of two to seven percent. As a result, two techniques are proposed which are: Massive MIMO which makes use of many antennas and thus vi improves the strength of the received signal; distance allocation technique which employs the allocation of LTE sites at a certain distance away from access BPL site depending on the voltage of the medium used.