Andrea Tonello and his former PhD student Alberto Pittolo received the prestigious IET 2016 Premium Award for the Best Paper published in IET Communications over the past two years

The paper “Physical layer security in power line communication networks: an emerging scenario, other than wireless” is a landmark paper that sheds new light on the information theoretic limits for secure communications in power line communication (PLC) channels.

“While physical layer security (PLS) is a well understood topic in wireless communications, this work for the first time addresses PLS in PLC. The PLC channel has very peculiar characteristics that render it much different from the well understood radio channel. Signal propagation in PLC networks is affected by some level of determinism that significantly affects the channel statistics and introduces correlation between the channel of the intended user and that of the eavesdropper. All of this influences the secrecy rate which is a measure of the speed of communication that can be achieved with total confidentiality”, Andrea Tonello says.

This award attests the outstanding work that is carried out by Tonello’s group on power line communications. This is the third award received by Tonello and his group in 2016 including the two best paper awards received at IEEE ISPLC 2016.  “We are devoting great endeavors in the field of PLC where we carry out research at experimental and theoretical level, looking for applications that can have a direct impact in boosting the PLC market for home networking, smart grids and in-vehicle communications. This award is such a great encouragement to keep our focus and to contribute further”, Tonello says.

Paper download: Physical layer security in power line communication networks: an emerging scenario, other than wireless, IET Communications, 2014, 8, (8), pp. 1239–1247