Performance of the Latest Generation Powerline Networking for Green Building Applications

Green building applications need to efficiently communicate fine-grained power consumption patterns of a wide variety of consumer-grade appliances for an effective adaptation and percolation of demand response models down to the consumer level appliances. A key inhibitor to the widespread adoption of such demand response policies at the consumer grade appliances level for intelligent building energy management, is the inability of smart plugs/sensors to efficiently communicate and control the power consumption. However since they already connected with the power grid, a natural question arises, whether the power consumption telemetry can be communicated over existing mains wiring. The use of existing wiring produces a simple and cost-effective attractive solution, and avoids many issues observed with wireless mesh networks, such as islands and bottlenecks and helps vacate the increasing congested spectrum. In this paper we explore the feasibility and efficacy of Powerline Communications (PLC) as a backbone of wireless communications in a home environment, both for high-bandwidth and low-bandwidth intensive applications. In this demo we show several state-of-the-art PLC modems' behavior using end-to-end measurements and their performance, throughput and noise characteristics.