UT ECE professor Brian Evans and his students Karl F. Nieman, Jing Lin and Marcel Nassar have received the Best Paper Award at the 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Powerline Communications and Its Applications.

The paper is entitled Cyclic Spectral Analysis of Power Line Noise in the 3-200 kHz Band and was co-authored with Freescale engineer Dr. Khurram Waheed. The IEEE ISPLC was held on March 25-27, 2013, in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The paper concerns Smart Grid communications from smart meters to the local utility over power lines. Communication performance is severely limited by time-periodic, impulsive, non-Gaussian additive noise. This paper analyzes the cyclic structure of powerline noise using field measurements and proposes cyclic bit loading to double bit rates over existing standards.