Soft Fault Estimation and Localisation in Y-Shaped Networks using OFDM-Based Signals

This paper introduces a method for detecting, estimating, and localising a soft fault in wired communication networks. The proposed method is based on analysing the transmission coefficients (TC) in the time domain under both fault-free and faulty situations. An orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM)-based scheme is used to estimate the TC. A fault-severity ratio is derived to estimate the fault intensity, while a residual-based function is proposed to determine its location. Experimental validation is carried out on a Y-shaped test setup to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.