A Surveillance And Control System Based On Powerline Communication

The usage of electrical power distribution networks as a media for communications, called Powerline Communications (PLC), has become more and more attractive in recent years. It has a number of advantages that attract great interest for the development of electrical market and business opportunities. The main attractive feature of this kind of media is due to its ubiquity. Indeed nowadays all urban, suburban and rural areas are fully covered by transmission and distribution electricity grid for devlivering energy services. Its ubiquity makes it an ideal media for surveillance and control applications. However, powerline communication channel is well known by experts as one of the most complex to characterize. It is often said that powerline acts as hostile environment. Besides the low pass characteristic of the channel and the frequency selective fading, the impedance mismatching, the signal reflection and the impulse noises crucially affact the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR).From a technical approach, this thesis addresses these challenges through the unique combination of narrowband PLC Modem hardware design and software implementation.In this thesis, we present the possibilities of applying PLC in the communication access networks. A concise summary of the state of the art of the theory and practice of Powerline Communication is presented. The powerline channel characteristics is analyzed based on measurement data. Some tips are given for PLC modem development to utilizing the characteristics. A hardware platform based on general purpose IC ARM and DSP is illustrated. A software impletation based on FSK (Frequency Shift Keying) is realised on the platform. Furthermore, an Embeded Web Server is developed using LPC2378 and the uC/OS-II RTOS (real time operating system). Finaly, a remote surveillance and control system is constructed based on narrowband powerline communication.