Developing powerline carrier applications on embedded systems

Abstract

Powerline carrier (PLC) is a popular communication technique that uses the existing power wiring (120 V, 240 V, etc) to carry information. It is a kind of "wireless" means of communication, because technology can supersede the installation of dedicated wiring in some applications. Although the powerline environment is a hard environment for any communication (switch mode power supplies use high frequency components, and usually a lot of tonal noise is generated) and everything (attenuation, phase response and noise level) can change over the frequency range, the transmission can be performed with amplitude shift keying, frequency shift keying or phase shift keying (for inexpensive but limited performance devices) or based on spread spectrum with a correlator for better performance devices. The paper proposes a modem solution for integrating powerline carrier capabilities inside microcontroller embedded systems in order to increase the communication capabilities of such devices. Extending network abilities and including powerline carrier resources in embedded systems are the main benefits.