A power line communication network infrastructure for the smart home

Low voltage electrical wiring in homes has largely been dismissed as too noisy and unpredictable to support high speed communication signals. However, recent advances in communication and modulation methodologies as well as in adaptive digital signal processing and error detection and correction have spawned novel media access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols, capable of supporting power line communication networks at speeds comparable to wired local area networks (LANs). In this paper we motivate the use of power line LAN’s as a basic infrastructure for building integrated ”smart homes,” wherein information appliances (IA)—ranging from simple control or monitoring devices to multimedia entertainment systems—are seamlessly interconnected by the very wires which provide them electricity. By simulation and actual measurements using ”reference design” prototype commercial powerline products, we show that the HomePlug MAC and PHY layers can guarantee QoS for real-time communications, supporting delay sensitive data streams for ”Smart Home” applications.