Modem para la comunicación por la red eléctrica

Abstract

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.