Power line communications

This article overviews the power line communication, which is originally devised to transmit electric power from a small number of sources to a large number of sinks. Initially the first data transmission were over power lines were primarily done only to protect sections of the power distribution system in case of faults. This paper also studies the performance of power lines for high bit rate applications. DMT technology is adopted by the homeplug standard can theoretically provide data rates of 100Mb/s. However, products based on the standard only have achieved data rates up to 14 Mb/s. To protect against the severe noisy conditions and fading in the powerline channel, very high levels of error control coding need to be provided. The efforts of the homeplug alliance and home networking technology´s growth in the US portend a very bright future for DMT-based PLC home networking.