An Innovative Approach for the Management of Cross-Coupling Interference in Street Lighting Networks

Power Line Communications (PLCs) are used for measuring various metrics, that can give signs about the health of the power grid equipment and for maintenance actions. These measurements may include the values of voltage, current, temperature and pressure of the power grid equipment. As it is known, the communication may also depend on the structure of the transmission medium, i.e. the parasitic capacitances and inductances and the cross-coupling interference between phases. This paper introduces an innovative solution with the aim to reduce the impact of noise and interferences in street light systems based on PLCs for telemetry. The proposed solution can cope with several problems, such as the capacitive and the inductive coupling among phases and attenuation. The goal of the solution introduced in this work is to make the communication, among master and slave nodes, reliable and immune to noise. The proposed solution also allows a significant reduction of power consumption with a consequent lowering of CO2 emissions, acting on the automatically dimming and switching off the street lamps.