Sensor network architecture for deployment over low voltage powerlines

This paper presents the design and implementation of an efficient sensor network (SN) over standard powerlines. As an application of the proposed SN, a home security and surveillance system was designed and implemented. The SN consists of a array of various types of security and surveillance sensors such as passive infrared motion detectors, glass/window break sensors, chemical/toxic gas sensors and smoke sensors. All the sensors will be connected to a gateway and a control panel through the pre installed powerlines. The gateway communicates with the sensors array using a medium access control (MAC) protocol which is created by combining the common Round Robin MAC and the Stop-and-Wait flow control protocol. The practical experiments conducted on the system have confirmed that the proposed design is robust, efficient and has several advantages over wireless and twistedpair wired sensor networks. The proposed network is implemented using the low-cost TDA5051A powerline modem and the 16F628A peripheral interface controller.