An interconnection approach and performance tests for in-home PLC networks

The concept of the electrical grid conceived as an infrastructure that only delivers power to the end users is going to disappear. In the next years, the electrical grid will be viewed as a smart grid (SG), namely, a distributed complex large scale system that needs to smartly manage flows of electricity produced by big or small plants. To fully exploit the SG potentialities, we think that it is mandatory to extend the SG concept to the home. In our vision the smart home (SH) network has to be developed to offer a broad variety of heterogeneous services that will improve the quality of life, yet addressing energy consumption challenges, and in parallel providing the delivery of information and entertainment services. In this paper, we describe a SH network architecture characterized by a tree like topology, where the communication among the nodes belonging to different levels of the tree is based on the internet protocol (IP). Some of the functionalities of this solution have been implemented in a network testbed where broadband (BB) power line communication (PLC) devices are used to provide (i) an IP backbone to allow interconnection between heterogeneous devices belonging to different subnetworks, and (ii) an increase of the performances of narrow band (NB) PLC technologies.