An analog spread-spectrum interface for power-line data communication in home networking

Communication using power line as a medium of signal transmission offers a convenient and inexpensive solution for multimedia signal transmission and control applications in smart home networking. This work presents a novel analog spread-spectrum (SS) scheme for physical-layer interface in home networking. The proposed communication scheme uses a chaotic system to modulate the information signal for wideband transmission. The wideband spectral property of the transmitted chaotic signal adds robustness to the proposed scheme against the hostile power-line environment that is characterized by non-Gaussian noise and multipath propagation. By exploiting the ergodic property of chaotic signals, a simple noncoherent receiver is developed here. Not only does the proposed analog scheme demonstrate satisfactory communication performance, but it can also be implemented with simple hardware and low manufacturing cost, which is an important consideration for cost-effective home networking. The proposed noncoherent SS system does not involve quantization and complex synchronization process and, hence, it is more efficient in transmitting analog multimedia signals compared to the conventional SS system. Performance analyses illustrate the superior communication performance of the proposed analog SS system over the conventional SS scheme for multimedia signal transmission in a power-line home networking environment.