Remotely powered sensor network over CATV infrastructure

Abstract

The CATV infrastructure has been deployed in most houses and buildings and the coaxial cables of the CATV infrastructure usually can provide sufficient bandwidth to accommodate other services as well as CATV service. We have proposed and demonstrated a novel remotely powered sensor network over the existing CATV infrastructure composed of coaxial cables, splitters and so on. The proposed sensor network has been implemented by using the wasted bandwidth of the coaxial cable (VHF and UHF bands) of the conventional CATV network without any change of the existing infrastructure. Furthermore, it supports a convenient remote power feeding from a central node to end nodes (sensor nodes) by using coaxial cable. We have developed transceiver for the wired sensor network matched the characteristics impedance of the coaxial cable of the CATV network. We also have developed protocol stack of the transceiver to interface with wired cable instead of air and to support the remote power feeding to the end nodes. We have confirmed the performance of the proposed sensor network by measuring the packet error rate (PER) for various data rates when the end nodes were remotely powered. The maximum transmission distance between the central node and the end node of the wired CATV network was about 265 m when the 128 sensor nodes were joined the network at the operating data rate of 250 kb/s.