Wr@p: A “last-meter” technology for energy-aware networked appliances

This paper presents a detailed analysis of Wr@p¹ technology (Web Ready Appliances Protocol, formerly Power Modulation), an ultra-low-cost powerline communication solution conceived for the electrical appliance market. Wr@p technology aims at making household appliances capable of network communication without significantly affecting their industrial cost. This may foster the diffusion of “smart” appliances and enables their interaction with the power-distribution grid, thus contributing to the smart grid paradigm. The Wr@p transceiver establishes a narrow-band communication channel exploiting the “last meter”, i.e. the appliance power-supply cord; at the outlet, a proxy device, the smart adapter (SA), flexibly deals with standard home networking protocols. At the appliance side, such an approach (i) allows for connectivity at negligible cost and, (ii) keeps hardware and software virtually independent of the actual home networking protocol (since different configurations of the smart adapter take care of it). In this work, after recalling the basics of Wr@p point-to-point communication, an extension to the multipoint-to-point scenario is introduced. Design of silicon integrated implementations into commercial microcontroller architectures are presented and the results of extensive test of fabricated devices are illustrated. Moreover, a complete Wr@p development solution is presented, featuring wireless networks integration.