Performance of the Latest Generation Powerline Networking for Green Building Applications

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2013-11-11

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

BuildSys'13 Proceedings of the 5th ACM Workshop on Embedded Systems For Energy-Efficient Buildings Pages 1-2

Rights

This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the author.

Abstract

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 in the home environment. A key hurdle to the widespread adoption of such demand response policies in these appliances is the lack of efficient connectivity to a local area network. One solution is delivering telemetry data over existing electrical infrastructure to which the devices are already connected. The use of existing wiring produces a simple and cost-effective solution, avoiding many issues observed with wireless mesh networks (such as islands and bottlenecks), while helping to vacate increasingly 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. We evaluate the behavior of several state-of-the art PLC modems using end-to-end measurements to establish their performance and throughput characteristics. Our preliminary results suggest that PLC is a promising technology for low-Bandwidth hungry green building applications but more in depth study is required before making large-scale smart grid deployment.