Electrical Appliances Networking: An Ultra-Low Cost Solution Based on Power-Line Communication

This paper discusses a novel communication system, devoted to networking of electrical appliances. The proposed solution relies on a "proxy" approach: bidirectional point-to-point communication (called ULP: ultra-low cost power-line) is established on the power-supply wire, between the appliance and the outlet. Here a transceiver embeds both network management functions and ULP communication, acting as a proxy between the appliance and the home network. The proposed approach provides several advantages: i) communication costs at the appliance side are kept at a minimum and, ii) appliance hardware and software are virtually independent from the actual networking protocol, managed by the external proxy device. In order to make the application of ULP communication straightforward, transceiver physical layer have been implemented in a dedicated peripheral for a general-purpose microcontroller. Test of the peripheral has been carried out by exploiting a development tool based on a muMC-FPGA mixed architecture, where programmable device is directly connected to the microprocessor bus. This solution closely emulates the perspective microcontroller architecture, and allows for extensive testing of the device under realistic operating conditions. ULP communication has been fully characterized, attaining a BER figure well below 10^-6.