Development of high-rate control system for LED based general lighting applications

Power-line communications (PLC) is an especially attractive communication technology to support cost efficient home networking applications because in home networking it can operate with high rates and moderate transmission power causing no interference problems for radio communications. An inherent benefit of PLC is its ability to work without any additional transmission infrastructure as it uses the existing power line cabling. Moreover, with the development of general-purpose PLC chip sets, the cost of designing and employing PLC systems is continuously reducing. The objective of this paper is to investigate some practical design and implementation aspects of a high-rate PLC-based home network. We start by giving an overview of some general properties of the investigated PLC system proceeding thereafter to have a more detailed discussion on the related circuit technology. We have developed a custom software to investigate network performance, that we then apply to estimate round-trip characteristics by TCP and UDP protocols to compare the developed PLC network to standard Ethernet. Our results indicate that the PLC technology is indeed a worthwhile alternative for high rate, cost-efficient home networking.