Design of a Power Line Communication System for Data Transmission over Existing Electrical Wiring in Nigerian Buildings

Deploying dedicated data cabling in existing Nigerian residential and commercial buildings for home network or building automation applications is expensive and disruptive. Power line communication offers an alternative that uses existing electrical wiring as the data transmission medium. This project designed and evaluated a power line communication system for transmitting digital data at low data rates over the existing 230V AC wiring in a Nigerian building environment. The system was built using TDA5051A PLC modem ICs operating at 60 kHz carrier frequency, interfaced with AVR ATtiny2313 microcontrollers for signal encoding and decoding using FSK modulation. Two prototype transceivers were constructed and tested at distances of 5, 10, 20, and 40 metres through typical Nigerian household wiring, including distribution boards and branch circuit wiring representative of Enugu State building installations. At 5 metres, data throughput was 1,200 bits per second with a bit error rate below 0.01 percent. At 40 metres, throughput degraded to 600 bits per second, and bit error rate increased to 1.8 percent due to noise from connected fluorescent and LED loads. The system successfully transmitted text string messages and basic sensor data packets without error up to 20 metres distance. The study identifies switched-mode power supply noise as the primary interference source on Nigerian household wiring and recommends adding adaptive notch filtering at the receiver to improve performance in high-noise environments typical of buildings with multiple inverter loads.

Keywords: power line communication, PLC modem, data transmission, building automation, embedded systems