Abstract
The Power Line Communications (PLC) technology allows the use of the power grid in order to ensure the exchange of data among devices. This technology is particularly useful in those environments where wired technologies are preferable, mainly for reasons related to reliability of communications. However, although the PLC technology has been investigated by researchers in several fields, such as communication protocols and impact due to noise, this paper focuses on a little investigated issue: the power consumption of devices. It is shown an approach, based on fuzzy logic, that dynamically manages the amplitude of the signal, with which each node transmits, by processing the master-slave link quality measured and the master-slave distance. The main objective is to reduce the power consumption during transmissions by managing some very important network information related to noise (link quality) and the distance from which derives the channel attenuation. The controller has been implemented on Matlab/Simulink and subsequently integrated into the ADD1010 microcontroller, a power line System on Chip (SoC). The paper described two test-bed scenarios. The first has been realized in laboratory and the second is a real case study represented by a street lighting system in the city of Castellana Sicula, Italy. In both cases, the TH/WL ratio (number of packets received divided by the number of packets sent) and the power consumption of each device were measured. The obtained results show that network information, like noise and distance among devices, can be positively used in order to reduce the power consumption and the overall TH/WL of the network.