Design and Evaluation of a T-shaped Adaptive Impedance Matching System for Vehicular Power Line Communication

The quality of the communication links in VPLC (vehicular power line communication) suffer from an impedance mismatch resulting from fluctuating VPLN (Vehicular Power Line Network) access impedance, which renders the fixed impedance matching circuit inefficient. In this paper, we designed a T-shaped adaptive impedance matching system on the basis of the resonance- and absorption-based T-shaped network complex impedance matching approach. We identified the load-Q (quality factor) for different matching situations to facilitate designing T-shaped networks with broad bandwidths. The designed T-shaped adaptive impedance matching system adjusts the component values of the T-shaped network to implement adaptive impedance matching between the VPLC modem and VPLN. A set of simulations are conducted for 1 MHz-100 MHz, which demonstrates that the designed adaptive matching system with a simple circuit structure and control logic is capable of significantly improving signal power transfer.