Thesis
Modem para la comunicación por la red eléctrica
Autor
Ing. Antonio Méndez, Raúl
Institución
Resumen
Lately the power line has gained great interest for information transmission. The main
reason is that the power line has been installed in many places around the world, from
urban to remote rural areas. For that reason it is cosidered a feasible way for transporting
communication signals. The power line can be found in any building (home, business, among
others), but also in cars, ships, airplanes even in spacecraft, where the electrical wiring allows
implementation systems that use the power grid for communication pourposes. From the
above, emerges three principal applications: the rst uses the low voltage power line as a last
mile solution. This means the last section of the infrastructure necessary to carry broadband
comunication services (like Internet), to the majority of the population which has only an
electric service. The second uses the power grid inside the buildings to establish local area
networks (LAN's), to share high data rate information among computers, peripherals and
multimedia devices. The third uses the vehicle electrical wiring to communicate di erent
electronic devices within the same.
Becuase the power grid was not designed for transport communication signals but for
power distribution, it presents characteristics that transform it into hostile environment for
data transmission. Therefore, this work focuses on the problematic of designing a hardware and
software platform that implements advanced techniques of digital signal processing and digital
communications suitable for implantation on power line communication modem. Speci cally
details the implementation of OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) as a
modulation technique using the FFT as a core. The algorithms that are presented in this
work are programmed in C language using a digital signal processor (DSP) TMS3206416T
as a processing unit. On the other hand, the design of an acquisiction module based on
the Spartan 3E FPGA from Xilinx is presented. This module virtually allows trials using
frequencies in the range of 5 to 30MHz (broadband trials).
Also, the design featured in this work has the potential to be
exible, which enables using it
as an investigation platform on new techniques and algorithms to help improve the processes
involved on power line communication. In addition, the codes in C and VHDL lenguage
facilitate their migration to other devices with higher hardware resources when required by
the design.