Enhancements of G3-PLC Technology for Smart-Home/Building Applications

To enable the smart grid concept, it is fundamental to consider the in-home/building context where,beside the conventional home networking services, home automation and smart energy managementservices have to be offered. In this paper, we consider the in-home/building scenario, for which wepropose a convergent network architecture to enhance the performance of the narrowband powerline communication (PLC) G3-PLC technology through its integration with an Ethernet-based network. To this end, we define the protocols characterizing the network modules, namely, switches androuters, which allow for integrating the G3-PLC with Ethernet devices. Since Ethernet represents aconvergent standard for many communication devices, by adding this functionality to G3-PLC,interconnectivity with other heterogeneous nodes can be offered. Furthermore, since the G3-PLCmedium access control layer is based on a carrier sense multiple access scheme, its performancedecreases when the number of network nodes contending for the channel increases. Therefore, weevaluate the network performance when an optimized time division multiple access scheme isadopted. The proposed convergent network architecture has been implemented in the OMNeT++network simulator