  This work discusses the suitability of typical power line communication (PLC)
pulses for fault sensing in power lines via pulse-compression time-domain
reflectometry (TDR). For this purpose, we first carefully outline a TDR system
operating over a power distribution network, discussing its limitations and
ultimately resorting to the pulse compression procedure. Next, we present
closed-form expressions for pulses and their autocorrelation functions of
typical PLC modulation schemes, namely Hermitian symmetric orthogonal
frequency-division multiplexing (HS-OFDM), impulsive ultra-wideband (UWB), and
chirp spread spectrum (CSS). Furthermore, different metrics are used on the
provided expressions in order to evaluate the suitability of the considered PLC
pulses for providing proper TDR measurements, i.e., \textit{reflectograms}, in
terms of resolution, effectiveness of the pulse compression, distortion, and
range. Considering the scenarios of European underground low-voltage and US
overhead medium-voltage power distribution networks, we finally carry out a
comparative numerical analysis among the considered PLC pulses in terms of the
aforementioned metrics for frequency bands comprising narrowband- and
broadband-PLC, with a highlight on compliance to regulatory constraints. Based
on the achieved results, we show that the use of UWB pulses allows the
obtaining of a larger number of reflectograms in a given time interval, while
HS-OFDM and CSS pulses provide higher reflectogram quality and better
resolution for a given occupied frequency bandwidth. Also, we show that NB-PLC
pulses are suitable for most distribution network scenarios, being the use of
BB-PLC left for cases where very fine resolutions are desired.
