Narrowband hybrid PLC/wireless: Transceiver prototype, hardware resource usage and energy consumption

Abstract

This work discusses a prototype of the so-called narrowband (NB) hybrid power line communication (PLC)/Wireless transceiver, which jointly uses parallel power line and wireless channels for providing data communication to the Industry 4.0, Smart Grids and the Internet of Things applications. The prototype introduces a modified version of the IEEE 1901.2 Standard, which was designed to fulfill NB - PLC applications, to implement the media access control (MAC) sublayer and the physical (PHY) layer of a hybrid transceiver that is capable of transmitting data through both power line and wireless channels. Therefore, the NB hybrid PLC/Wireless transceiver prototype is compatible with a NB - PLC transceiver that makes use of the IEEE 1901.2 Standard. Moreover, both transceivers can constitute heterogeneous data communication networks that are capable of improving reliability and coverage. Furthermore, based on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device, we discuss the hardware resource usage and energy consumption analyses and the hardware feasibility of implementing a bit correction technique at the link layer of the NB hybrid PLC/Wireless transceiver prototype. We show that the signal/data processing block of the proposed transceiver demands only 1.12 times the energy consumption required by a NB - PLC transceiver based on the IEEE 1901.2 Standard. Moreover, the designed roadmap for this kind of hybrid PLC/wireless transceiver demands 1.5 times the hardware resource usage in comparison to the implementation of the PLC transceiver based on the IEEE 1901.2 Standard. Finally, we show that up 5 bits can be corrected at the link layer level without increasing the clock frequency.