Power Line Communication for Building Automation Using Visible Light Sensing Systems

Occupancy detection systems, considering various underlying technologies, can successfully, in collaboration with Power Line Communication (PLC) technology, decrease the energy consummation of a building. In particular, the reuse of existing building resources by means PLC is evaluated. This allows an estimated building occupancy based on Visible Light Sensing (VLS) technology, which can detect the number of people only by acquiring the reflections of visible light, to be transmitted in cost-effective, reliable and environmentally friendly way. Special emphasis is placed on PLC network architecture effort, necessary to establish the required communication between VLS enabled lights each controlled with highly integrated system-on-chips. This includes PLC baseband modem and analog front-end integrated circuits. For this purpose, the operation and the capabilities of PLC chips are considered in full detail.