Designing A Power-line Network for Information Appliance Communication

Abstract

Supporting the multimedia communication between information appliance (IA) devices is an important design issue for the intelligent homes of the future. The power-line network provides an attractive infrastructure because of its wide availability of power-line wiring and power sockets. In this paper, we have investigated the traffic patterns generated by possible IA devices. With reasonable assumptions, we have investigated three IA placement methods and their impact for supporting different traffic types. In conjunction with the placement methods, it appears that the number of branches is indeed an important design factor. We particularly propose an effective placement procedure called the Minimize Trunk Traffic (MTT) method to yield a significant performance improvement among all IA traffic types. By using the MTT placement method, the overall recommendation from this study suggests that a typical home network based on power-line communication should be designed with five or six branches.