
Realization of Home Appliances Control System based on Power Line
Communication Technology
Chao-Huang Wei
1
Hoang Than
2
Yu-Ning Wang
3
Department of Electrical Engineering, Southern Taiwan University, Tainan, Taiwan
1
drwei@mail.stut.edu.tw
2
3
ABSTRACT
Home automation is an integral part of modern lives that
helps to monitoring and controls the home electrical
devices as well as other aspects of the digital home that is
expected to be the standard for the future home. Home
appliance control system enables the house owner to
control devices such as stove, refrigerator, air-conditioner,
and lightings remotely or monitoring the house status.
Monitoring and control may be done by a personal digital
device such as a laptop, PDA, telephone, or even a cell
phone. One of the technologies well used by domestics to
connect the home controller with the appliances is using
the Power-Line Communication (PLC) protocol for data
transmission. In this paper two types of home appliances
PLC controller will be implemented based on the
HomePlug Command and Control (HPCC) standard.
Keywords: PLC, Embedded System, Home Network.
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, the rapid development of information
technology has brought powerful changes to the structure
of automation system, and makes people to set a higher
request to security, comfort and efficiency of home
environment. Intelligent household devices have become a
research focus in home automation industry, for how to let
television set, refrigerator, lightings, alarm sensor, and
other home devices work efficient and easy to be used.
Under such demand home appliances should not only
operate by itself, but also with other devices together, i.e.
they should be connected within a network for easy
management.
Many accessing methods for controlling home
appliances can be used, such as by hard wired line,
telephone line, Ethernet cable, radio frequency, infrared, or
powerline. Technically, they are divided in two types of
networking techniques; the first one is data exchange
between transmitter and receiver in a wireless way, i.e.
Bluetooth, 802.15.4/ZigBee or Z-wave, the other
networking alternative is based on fixed wire line i.e.
telephone line, Ethernet cable and others. Power-line is a
special media, which transport not only the AC power to
devices, but also the multimedia or control data to and
from the device; the benefits of using this media are the
availability and quantity of electrical outlets in a house and
no new wiring necessary for building the network [1 ~5].
Power-Line Communication (PLC) technology [6, 7]
utilized the household electrical power wiring as the
transmission medium. Using this technique for remote
automation control in house requires no installation of
additional control wiring. Originally, the application of
PLC was mainly to secure the normal operation of the
electric power supply system in case of malfunctions or
faults through the instant exchange of information between
power plant, substation and distribution center, thereby
making this approach a competitive alternative to smart
home networking, considering the benefit of its robustness,
ready connectivity as well as availability.
In terms of transmission rate and frequency
bandwidth, PLC technology holds no remarkable
predominance over other widespread networking
technologies. In fact, the prerequisite of massive adoption
of PLC technology is based on the fact that power lines
have extended to every residence with multiple outlets
installed in each room, which means that device control
information and power supply are integrated as a whole
through one outlet. There is no extra wiring indoors for
the economy and convenience to residents.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section
II describes the theory and some protocols in the PLC
technologies. In section III, the design implementation is
presented. The experiment and results are presented in
section IV. Section V presents some conclusion and
discussion for the future work.
II. PROTOCOLS IN THE PLC TECHNOLOGIES
To control intelligent home appliances the digital
control signal will modulate an analog carrier signal,
which will be propagated through the whole AC power
grid at home on the same distribution system, therefore
each receiver has its own "device address" that designates
the owner of the control signal. These receivers may be
either plugged into regular power outlets, or permanently
wired in place.
Figure 1 shows the typical power-line communication
system, a PLC modem converts a data signal received
from conventional communication devices, such as
computers, PDAs, or Laptops in a form that is suitable for
transmission over power-lines. In the other transmission
direction, the modem receives a data signal from the power
grids and after conversion delivers it to the
communications devices.
Kommentare zu diesen Handbüchern