A prototype of a narrowband hybrid PLC/Wireless transceiver

Abstract

This thesis focuses on a prototype of the so-called narrowband (NB) hybrid power line communication (PLC)/Wireless transceiver, which jointly uses power line and wireless channels, in parallel, for data communication related to smart grid (SG) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. To build the prototype, it is introduced an enhanced and adapted version of the IEEE 1901.2 Standard to implement the medium access control (MAC) sublayer and the physical (PHY) layer to transmit data through both channels. The enhancement is based on the use of the Hilbert transform to recover the quadrature information from both channels, enabling to estimate the frequency deviation between the transmitter and receiver’s clocks. One adaptation in the IEEE 1901.2 Standard is the introduction of a routing protocol, which enables the transceivers to communication with nodes two hops or farther from each other. The other adaptation is the implementation of a packet error correction technique at the link layer level, which combines packets with errors received from PLC and wireless media and correct them, under certain constraint. Moreover, relevant is the fact that the NB hybrid PLC/Wireless transceiver is compatible with the NB PLC transceiver based on the IEEE 1901.2 Standard. The NB hybrid PLC/Wireless transceiver prototype is implemented in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device and details about the implementation, using a hardware description language (HDL), are provided, highlighting the pursuit of hardware resource savings. Numeric results discuss the time analysis of the packet error correction technique, calculating its maximum capacity of correction taking into account the IEEE 1901.2 Standard time constraints. Furthermore, a PHY layer data-rate analysis shows that the implementation agree with the IEEE 1901.2 Standard and can perfectly satisfy the needs of SG and IoT applications. In addition, the hardware resource usage and power consumption analysis show that the NB hybrid PLC/Wireless transceiver prototype demands less than one and a half times the hardware resource usage and power consumption of the NB PLC transceiver prototype.