Analysis of Wireless Communication over Electromagnetic Impulse Noise Channel

Wireless communication in power grid environment faces peculiar power system environment specific noise. Owing to its impulsive nature, the characterization of such noise is critically important and fundamentally different from the existing analysis. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the impact of power system electromagnetic impulse noise in smart grid environment on the performance of wireless communication between the grid health monitoring devices (e.g., Phasor Measurement Units) and the local data concentrator. It uses a classical approach in the derivation of a re-parameterized impulse noise model from its characteristic function. A comparison of outage probability between the corona impulse noise (CIN)-ridden and noise-free channel is studied. The study is extended for comparison with co-channel interference (CCI) for establishing a better understanding of the power specific electromagnetic impulse noise. A modified performance metric called signal-to-pulse-noise ratio is defined and its probability distribution is derived and compared with the additive white Gaussian noise, CIN and CCI-ridden channel statistics. The physical layer wireless channel characterization analysis is extended further to study the average system throughput via Markov modeling of the channel.