Pulse Position Modulation Based Energy Detection for Smart Grid Communication

Smart Grid Network (SGN) concept is developed for dynamically and automatically respond to changes in power grid conditions, which will require sensors to provide detection of signal for real-time information and status. The most distinguishing attribute of Pulse Position Modulation (PPM) in SG Communications is its non-coherent detection. It avoids complex channel estimation which becomes a very complicated process due to very large bandwidth and fine time resolution with large number of multipath components. In this paper, we analyze PPM based energy detection for sensing in smart grid networks where intelligent devices for power monitoring, smart sensors and smart meters for Home Area Network (HAN) or Neighborhood Area Network (NAN) can start transmission at any time. In contrast to well-known case of Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel, we further extended our investigation to KG composite model and the effect of fading and shadowing severity is discussed extensively. Reduction in either the fading index m or shadowing parameter m ₀ influences the channel characteristics and declines the error performance. Hence, the presented results furnish guidelines for energy detection based sensing of PPM modulated signal for SGN various communication models.