An efficient real-time infrastructure for home automation based on powerline communications

Evolving trends in home automation encompass a wide variety of heterogeneous and bandwidth intensive applications, often constrained, as in the case of audio streaming and remote video surveillance, by real-time requirements. A determinant role in this context is played by the communication infrastructure, which deeply impacts on the costs, performances and flexibility of the underpinned technology. Unlike most of current solutions that typically rely on ad hoc wired or wireless physical interconnects, our approach seamlessly combines the flexibility and the performances offered by HomePlug powerline communications with the determinism and the interoperability exhibited by Ethernet Powerlink, a real-time protocol derived from the industrial automation domain. The concrete viability of the approach has been experimentally ascertained employing a purposely designed open-source middleware, supporting this communication infrastructure also on web-based and mobile platforms.