A Novel Power Supply System Based on a Packet Exchange Network Architecture

In this paper, we have proposed a new type of power supply system that uses a single pair of wires to provide various specifications of electric power. The IEEE 802.3af (a.k.a. Power over Ethernet) [6] is a technology that can transmit electricity over Unshielded Twisted Pair cables, however, this technology provides only 48 V DC and does not provide any networking functions. In contrast, our system abstracts electric power into packets and uses a network protocol to transmit them appropriately. We have designed our system to be flexible and extensible. Our motivation is to build a large- scale power supply network similar to the Internet. Hence, we have developed our MAC layer protocol on the basis of the Ethernet protocol which has strong affinity with Internet Protocol.