Moving HomePlug to Industrial Applications with Power-Line Communication Network

Abstract

Home networking is becoming an attractive application not only for the Internet access but also for home automation. Being a high-speed and dominant standard presently, HomePlug has an important role in home LAN connecting to the Internet. For industrial applications, the Power Line Communication also has significant advances. However, the PHY/MAC technology provided by HomePlug still cannot be employed with some critical features such as real time performance, implications in the event of link and node loss. In this paper, the characteristics of HomePlug PHY/MAC, the property of power line channel, as well as the noise features of power line are analyzed. Based on HomePlug, a model of high level real-time protocol applied to industrial environment is proposed. The protocol simultaneously belongs to layer two and three, and can support real-time implementation with no loss and small delay according to the requirement in PLC networks, for targeting to develop a real time network with high speed power line media and advanced modulation.