Real-time communication routing protocol for home automation via power line

Low voltage electrical wiring in homes has largely been dismissed as too noisy and unpredictable to support high speed communication signals. Power Line Communication (PLC) is a communication method where signals are carried across already existing power lines, rather than through other mediums such as optical fibers or radio waves. PLC has been a very important inter-discipline topic for power, communications, industrial and automation engineers and researchers since 1980s. Designing and planning optimized or standard PLC systems require information and data regarding signal attenuations, load variations and communication performance for various locations of the world which have different power networks. In this paper, we highlight our own proprietary designed real-time communication (RTC) routing protocol based on flood transmission for the application of home automation via power line. The designed protocol also has features such as multitasking, Amplitude Shift Keying (ASK) modulation and even parity error detection. Multipoint of receiver units can be controlled (On / Off) by the main controller unit sending command data using power line as transmission medium to the corresponding devices. Analysis on protocol performance and reliability test in terms of packet drop, delay-jitter and number of loads along the line had been carried out.