Communications over Aircraft Power Lines: a Practical Implementation

This paper presents a practical implementation of a hardware design for transmission of data over aircraft power lines. The intent of such hardware is to significantly reduce the wiring in the aircraft instrumentation system. The potential usages of this technology include pulse code modulation (PCM), Ethernet and other forms data communications. Details of the fieldprogrammable gate array (FPGA) and printed circuit board (PCB) designs of the digital and analog front end will be discussed. The power line is not designed for data transmission. It contains considerable noise, multipath effects, and time varying impedance. Spectral analysis data of an aircraft is presented to indicate the difficulty of the problem at hand. A robust modulation is required to overcome the harsh environment and to provide reliable transmission. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been used in power line communication industry with a great deal of success. OFDM has been deemed the most appropriate technology for high-speed data transmission on aircraft power lines. Additionally, forward error correction (FEC) techniques are discussed.