The use of Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) techniques for Power Line Communications (PLC) has been proven for the consumer market. As of 2011, MIMO is part of two PLC standards and products are already available for end users. PLC for avionics on the other hand is a niche technology. Fulfilling the high demands for safety-critical components makes the engineering of a PLC solution a challenging task. Many aircraft systems are powered by a three-phase alternating current system and already provide the necessary wiring for adopting MIMO techniques. Our goal is to develop next generation PLC systems for aircraft with MIMO technology.

The signal propagation on power lines is known to be complex which makes channel modeling a fundamental challenge in the development of PLC systems. Because of the safety-critical nature of avionics applications, the channel models need to be accurate, but more importantly, should represent the actual conditions as realistically as possible.

We present a test bench that emulates the cabin lighting system in an aircraft. The layout of the wire harness is designed such that realistic distances and complexities within the network can be reproduced within a smaller area on the test bench. The original design has been validated with simulations by Bertuol et al. to make sure that the test bench is as close to a real scenario as possible. The design has been modified to provide a three- phase infrastructure and thus allow MIMO communications. The test bench has been used to perform extensive channel measurements, on which we base our channel characterization. We evaluate the channel gain of the different channels, but also MIMO characteristics such as the spatial correlation, and analyze the impact of different topological aspects such as link length or network complexity.