AN INTRODUCTION TO POWER LINE COMMUNICATION(PLC)

Power Line Communications (PLC) is the use of existing electrical cables to transport data, and it has been around for a very long time. Power utilities have been using this technology for many years to send or receive data on the power grid using the existing infrastructure. For instance, the electrical power utility in London used PLC to remotely control some of its equipment on the grid (such as high-voltage switches) in the 1920s. This technique is still employed by several utilities that use analog or digital devices to transfer 9.6 Kbits/s over many miles of electrical cable. More recently, the development of home automation (the current notion of smart houses) and car automation (cutting cable costs and weight, and networking the devices in-car) has pushed the use of low bit rate PLC techniques with technologies such as X10 or LonWorks. Some major home-device manufacturers have announced in recent months that they will integrate PLC chips into their products to prepare the future network of the smart house. But the real turning point for PLC came with the high bit rate technologies of chips that allow several Mbits/s over any typical in-home electrical network, with the universal Ethernet or USB interfaces. Now more and more electronics products integrate such interfaces, and PLC technologies allow them to be connected over an existing network of cables "in-wall" with a simple plug-and-play in any outlet.