UPA’s vision of Coexistence for Powerline Communications ISPLC Florida Chano Gómez – DS2

Introduction UPA was established by the founding members in May 2004 as an international non-profit trade association. The UPA was founded on the common belief of a set of leading companies who shared the vision of a PLC landscape based on:  World-wide standards for power line communications;  Integrating PLC into the telecommunications landscape  Providing consistent, credible and unifying communication on PLC;  Taking a universal view of the market and embracing all applications whether access, in-home, multimedia or other PLC application;  Ensuring speed of deployment of PLC worldwide. UNIVERSAL meaning Scope: Access and Home-networking, Coexistence and Interoperability Worldwide: America, Europe and Asia represented. Companies represented: manufacturers, utilities, chip providers, systems integrators…

Facts Members of UPA include:  AcBel Polytech Inc.  Ambient Corporation  Commax  Corinex Communications  Current Technologies International  DS2  EDF  Duke Energy  Itochu Corporation  Ilevo (Schneider Electric Powerline Communications)  PCN Technology  ST&T  Sumitomo Electric Industries  Tecnocom  Telekom Research and Development SDN BHD  Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH  TOYO Network Systems. UPA Chairman of the Board  Eric Morel, ILEVO (Schneider company) Web site 

Why is there a need for coexistence at all? In an ideal world, everybody would use the same standard. In the real world, different organizations have designed their systems for specific applications, with different requirements, different cost constraints, etc. The result is that each one has designed its technology in a different and incompatible way. It’s difficult to agree on a single common standard, specially if each technology has an installed base and has already invested a large amount of money in product development. In the long term, the work of organizations like ETSI PLT and/or IEEE 1901 will create a single standard for PHY and MAC for all applications of powerline communications. In the short term there is a need for coexistence mechanisms that allow different technologies, based on different PHY/MAC layers, to share power lines.

History of the UPA Coexistence specifications Dec 2004Kick off of the Coexistence WG of UPA Jan 2005Description of network electricity networks topologies. Worldwide scope. Mar 2005First draft Apr 2005Performance simulation May 2005Last draft Jul 2005Approval by the BoD and Publication Improvement phase started

Coexistence issues addressed by UPA In-Home/Access issues  Between In-Home devices and Access equipment –in the same customer home –between neighbors In-Home/In-Home –in the same customer home –between neighbors

Coexistence main requirements Provide a fair and balanced sharing of resources  between one Access system and several In-home systems  between In-home systems (up to 3 different systems at the same time) Can be implemented with any technology at low cost & low impact on performance  minimize the additional hardware/software needed for adding coexistence to an existing implementation  compatible with the QoS requirements of the different systems Work with the most usual topologies Optimize the use of resources  activation limited to local area where interference takes place. No impact on the remaining parts of the networks.  re-use resources not used by idle nodes

Different Approaches to Coexistence Time-division approach Frequency-division approach Both have advantages and disadvantages for specific scenarios UPA supports both methods, so that the best one can be chosen in each specific case

Coexistence transmission area interference area Networks taking turns

Coexistence transmission area interference area accessin-home Networks sharing frequency

UPA mechanism is very flexible It takes benefit of both FDM and TDM A dynamic FDM-scheme provides isolation between Access devices and In-Home devices.  Each system manages its QoS independently  When only one system is installed, it can use the whole frequency band. A dynamic TDM is used between In-Home systems.  Different networks take turns for usage of the channel  Bandwidth is shared dynamically based on QoS requirements of each network and application. TDM between In-Home and Access systems is also supported for those scenarios where it is convenient.

Conclusions UPA coexistence specification is a flexible approach to the issue of coexistence both in the case of access vs in- home and in the case of in-home vs in-home networks. UPA coexistence specification supports both frequency- division and time-division coexistence mechanisms UPA coexistence specification was published on Jul 2006, and can be freely downloaded from UPA’s web-site [ UPA is open to discuss the specification with other industry organizations and is also contributing to official standardization bodies like IEEE and ETSI.