Design And Implementation Of Routing Method For Low Voltage Power Line Carrier Communication

Power Line Communication (Power Line Communications, PLC) uses the power line as a medium for information transmission. It has several advantages over other communication methods such as high construction speed, low additional investment, and lack of need for additional indoor wiring. Thus, it is becoming the most popular way of communication for power companies. In this paper, we focused on the application of low voltage power line, and committed to the full use of the ubiquitous existing electricity network resources. During the transmission of electricity, more data is transmitted to support remote automatic meter reading system, automatic street light control system, smart home system, etc.. However, in practical applications, the power line communication environment is bad, signal transmission attenuation and noise level are high, and coupled impedance could change anytime unpredictably. Therefore, to achieve reliable high speed transmission, it is equally important to build fast, flexible, robust network in addition to improving the success rate of low voltage power line carrier terminal point to point communication.In this paper, we propose a new routing technique based on the study particularity of low voltage power line carriers. During initialization of the network, our technique took advantage of the exchange of information between nodes to divide collision domains and to implement space division multiplexing, which greatly improved the efficiency of networking. While the network was running, each node recorded the communication quality to its neighbor nodes in real time, periodically started routing evaluation function, and found the optimal communication path, to minimize the impact of sudden changes in noise and electrical load to the communication channel. By the continuous reconstruction of the network, we can achieve the reliability and timeliness of the entire communications link, and then solve the unreliable problem between nodes in low voltage power line communication network due to sudden interference. Our technique also introduces multipath mechanism to solve a single data transmission failure.Our technique has been successfully used in the commercial centralized automatic meter reading system of the power grid. It has a large number of installations across the country, and there are more than 500,000 nodes running on site. Its performance has met the requirements of the power grid, and far beyond similar products made by other manufactures.