A Novel Power Line Communication Based Home Energy Management System

Home energy management system (HEMS), a key user side component of the smart grid, is significant for reducing the energy consumption. This paper designed and implemented a home energy management system based on power line communication (PLC). The system is used for monitoring and managing the energy use of appliances. In this paper, the following work is completed:1. A novel network layer management protocol based on multi-master low voltage PLC is proposed. The core of the protocol concentrates on the multi-master dynamic address assignment mechanism. A salient feature of the protocol is that PLC devices can self-configure and self-manage their network address. Experiments show that the protocol is flexible and reliable. It is an ideal choice for the PLC networks consisting of various flexible and plug-and-play devices.2. A home energy management system composed of smart sockets and power gateway is designed. The system collects information through the local networks composed by smart sockets and power gateway and communicates with the internet through an embedded web server implemented in the power gateway.3. The expected goal is achieved after the joint commissioning based on the smart socket, power gateway and PC. The energy management can be implemented through a web browser.The system, based on real-time energy consumption information displaying, can make a reasonable power consuming schedule and minimize the cost in power usage. Experiments show that it is an ideal choice for the energy management system of home and office intelligent systems, as well as the energy management system of the industrial systems with low data transfer rate and soft real time requirements.