Power-line impedance modeling of tractor-trailer system

This paper focuses on the channel characterization and modeling for power line communication (PLC) inside a Tractor-Trailer system. Understanding the behavior of the power line in tractor-trailer system at PLC frequency bands is quintessential for designing the PLC system to achieve desired performance. In this paper, s-domain impedance signatures for the tractor, trailer, dolly, harness and electronic control unit (ECU) has been developed by making impedance measurements of the system under different loading scenarios. The transfer function model predicting the PLC channel impedance under the given frequency band (75 kHz–425 kHz), shows good agreement between the estimated and measured data on a tractor-trailer system test bed platform.