Reliable power line communication — A vehicle to smart home and smart energy

Power Line Communication or PLC - Using power line to connect and communicate is not new. But the data flowing over power lines connecting smart energy devices inside and outside homes imposes new challenges. Those devices include electrical meters (e-Meters or smart meters), distributed generators (wind, solar, heat+power), power switches, power plants, inverters, and distributed consumer electronics, sensing and monitoring devices. One of the most important requirements for the connectivity of those devices is high reliability. All the components need to be reliably connected all the time in any geographic location or environmental condition, and resilient to any interference. In this paper, we present several unique PLC architectures to achieve such highly reliable communications.