This master's thesis deals with a narrowband power line communication technology (PLC) and focuses on the potential use in the sensor networks. This thesis addresses both the structure and basic properties of PLC standard and possible use of this application in practice. The main part of this work is implementation of the PLC networks with IC ST7570 of STMicroelectronics. As an example of practical use of PLC technology, this network is connected to the computer where the data from the sensor (meter) connected to a PLC modem, stored in a database using a PHP script as presented by the Internet. Problem solving in this thesis focuses primarily on the simplicity and universality of the resulting applications.

The dissertation thesis focuses on the analysis and modelling of power line communication. In first part of the thesis, a basic information of power line communication are described, primarily principle, advantage and disadvantage. The physical layer of the transmission and the fundament of modelling are described later. In the following section the objectives of the dissertation thesis are specified. Experimental verification of the created models and creating of indoor and outdoor models are one of the major goals of this work. These models approximate the real parameters of the power lines communication with sufficient precision. A detailed analysis of existing and current research in power line communication modeling, especially for the power line models, then follows. Based on this analysis a mathematical description of the models is specified and reference model for different scenarios is designed. The communication channel model, power line model and noise model are designed in own solution part. In this part the main goals, experimental verification of created models and designed of models for indoor and outdoor line were also realized. By merging of individual models, PLC communication system model with all parameters analyzed in detail arise. The analyzed parameters which were previously published, do not contain these parameters coherently. The last part of the thesis gives a summary of the results of these analyzes and discussion of simulation results.

<div>Neuromorphic computing has gained tremendous interest because of its ability to overcome the limitations of traditional signal processing algorithms in data intensive applications such as image recognition, video analytics, or language translation. The new computing paradigm is built with the goal of achieving high energy efficiency, comparable to biological systems.</div><div>To achieve such energy efficiency, there is a need to explore new neuro-mimetic devices, circuits, and architecture, along with new learning algorithms. To that effect, we propose two main approaches:</div><div><br></div><div>First, we explore an energy-efficient hardware implementation of a bio-plausible Spiking Neural Network (SNN). The key highlights of our proposed system for SNNs are 1) addressing connectivity issues arising from Network On Chip (NOC)-based SNNs, and 2) proposing stochastic CMOS binary SNNs using biased random number generator (BRNG). On-chip Power Line Communication (PLC) is proposed to address the connectivity issues in NOC-based SNNs. PLC can use the on-chip power lines augmented with low-overhead receiver and transmitter to communicate data between neurons that are spatially far apart. We also propose a CMOS '<i>stochastic-bit</i>' with on-chip stochastic Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (sSTDP) based learning for memory-compressed binary SNNs. A chip was fabricated in 90 nm CMOS process to demonstrate memory-efficient reconfigurable on-chip learning using sSTDP training. </div><div><br></div><div>Second, we explored coupled oscillatory systems for distance computation and convolution operation. Recent research on nano-oscillators has shown the possibility of using coupled oscillator networks as a core computing primitive for analog/non-Boolean computations. Spin-torque oscillator (STO) can be an attractive candidate for such oscillators because it is CMOS compatible, highly integratable, scalable, and frequency/phase tunable. Based on these promising features, we propose a new coupled-oscillator based architecture for hybrid spintronic/CMOS hardware that computes multi-dimensional norm. The hybrid system composed of an array of four injection-locked STOs and a CMOS detector is experimentally demonstrated. Energy and scaling analysis shows that the proposed STO-based coupled oscillatory system has higher energy efficiency compared to the CMOS-based system, and an order of magnitude faster computation speed in distance computation for high dimensional input vectors.</div>

Author: Bc. Adéla Poluhová Title: Analysis of distance learning during the state of emergency at selected lower-secondary school Objectiv: The aim of the diploma thesis is to analyze the implementation of distance learning during the state of emergency at the selected lower- secondary school and finding differences in using applications during full time teaching and during the state of emergency. Methods: There search part uses a qualitative method an analysis, which describes the implementation of distance learning at the lower - secondary school during the emergency measure and quantitative method the results of a questionnaire surfy conducted among teachers. Results: The reset of the diploma thesis is a summary of the distance education developementat a lower-secondary school and thee valuation of a questionnaire survey. This survey is proces send to tables and graphs, which are described, evaluated and compared. Keywords: distance learning, state of emergency, emergency measures, on-line communication tools

Power line communication has been around in past decades and gained renewed attention thanks to the demand of high-speed Internet access. With the significant advantages of existing infrastructure and accessibility to even remote areas, power grid has become one of the promising competitors for multi-media transmission in household. However, the power line was not oriented for data transmission providing a rather hash environment. To overcome the difficulties, advanced modulation and channel coding schemes should be employed. In the thesis low density parity check code (LDPC) is employed to reduce the loss caused by various kinds of effects in the channel especially the noise since its performance approaches to Shannon capacity limit. Moreover, OFDM multi-carrier transmission technique is involved which could decrease the inter-symbol interference and frequency selective fading. Nevertheless, LDPC decoding process was designed specifically for the common Gaussian white noise condition, combined with OFDM modulation the system still could not provide satisfying and practicable performance so improvements are needed for the system. The main works of the thesis are as follows. Set up an environment of power line transmission investigating and simulating the channel characteristics; employ multi-path channel model and Class‐A noise model for further developing the improvement algorithms to deal with the selective fading and impulse noise. Two algorithms proposed here are from different perspectives: the first one is modifying initial posterior information for LDPC decoding and the second one aims at suppressing the impulse noise after demodulation. Finally, a few simulations are performed to reveal the effectiveness of proposed methods. As a result, the improved scheme shows a great superiority improving the performance by no less than 5dB compared to traditional system.

Radio frequency (RF) spectrum congestion motivates the search for alternative communication techniques to complement radio systems. Visible light communications (VLC) is an emerging technology that exploits the recent and ever-growing increase in the usage of energy-efficient light emitting diodes (LEDs) to imperceptibly modulate the optical power output of LEDs to enable communication and augment RF networks. Orthogonal frequency-divison multiplexing (OFDM) has been proposed as a modulation scheme for VLC due to its high spectral efficiency, ease of channel estimation and equalization, resistance to inter-symbol interference (ISI) and frequency-selective fading, efficient implementation using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), and compatibility with RF and power-line communication (PLC) standards that use OFDM. One of the major drawbacks of conventional OFDM techniques is the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of OFDM signals. The peaks of the OFDM signals are clipped due to the limited dynamic range of the LED, which translates the high PAPR of the OFDM signal into non-linear distortion (NLD). This signal distortion causes bit-error rate (BER) performance degradation, especially at high optical signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) typical of indoor VLC scenarios. In this thesis, a new family of modulation techniques, termed spatial optical OFDM (SO-OFDM), is proposed with the aim of reducing the PAPR of conventional DC-biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM) by making use of the large number of LEDs typically available in indoor lighting settings. Each LED group signal is a narrowband signal consisting of a small number of subcarriers, and thus has a smaller PAPR than the original OFDM signal. Firstly, SO-OFDM is introduced and its two key concepts of frequency-to-space mapping and spatial summing are explained. Frequency-to-space mapping is achieved by allocating a subset of OFDM subcarriers to each LED. Each LED group signal is a narrowband signal consisting of a small number of subcarriers, and thus has a smaller PAPR than the original OFDM signal. Several design variations of the subcarrier assignment to LEDs are introduced and are shown through simulations, to reduce PAPR, and NLD noise due to clipping, and improve the BER performance at high SNRs as compared to DCO-OFDM. In addition, luminous efficacy is identified as an important lighting design parameter that is impacted by modulation. Relative luminous efficacy is defined as the ratio of the luminous efficacy of a modulated LED to that of an LED driven by a DC signal, and is introduced as a metric to assess the impact of modulation on LED lighting. Relative luminous efficacy links communication parameters such as signal variance to lighting design requirements. Secondly, a low-complexity amplify-and-forward (AF) scheme is proposed for an integrated power-line communication/visible-light communication (PLC/VLC) where SO-OFDM is used for the VLC link. Frequency translation of the incoming PLC signal is used to increase the usable bandwidth of the LED. The use of both frequency translation and SO-OFDM leads to capacity gains over DCO-OFDM in the high SNR regime. Finally, a low-complexity variant of SO-OFDM, termed square-wave SO-OFDM (SW-SO-OFDM), is proposed. Square-wave SO-OFDM uses square-wave carriers instead of sinusoidal waves to modulate a single OFDM subcarrier signal per LED. By using square-wave carriers, SW-SO-OFDM eliminates the need for digital-to-analog converters (DACs), digital predistortion (DPD), and the FFT operation. Squarewave SO-OFDM is also shown, through simulations, to achieve BER performance gains over SO-OFDM and DCO-OFDM. In addition, an experimental demonstration of SW-SO-OFDM with 64 QAM modulation on subcarriers is described. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Visible-light communications (VLC) is an emerging technology that exploits the increasingly widespread use of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for indoor lighting, and modulates the optical power output of the LED for data transmission. Among the various modulation techniques that have been proposed for VLC, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) offers high data rates, resistance to channel impairments, and simple channel estimation and equalization. However, OFDM signals suffer from a high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) which degrades the efficiency of the power amplifier in the transmitter and hinders the communication performance. In this thesis, a new multiple-LED modulation technique, termed spatial optical OFDM (SO-OFDM), is proposed to reduce the PAPR. Using a frequency-to-space mapping, SO-OFDM divides the wideband high-PAPR OFDM signal into multiple narrowband low-PAPR signals and assigns each signal to a group of LEDs. Spatial summing of the transmitted signals occurs at the receiver allowing for the use of a conventional OFDM receiver. Several variations of SO-OFDM are introduced and are shown, using simulations, to reduce the PAPR, combat non-linear distortion (NLD), and improve the bit-error rate (BER) performance at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), typical of VLC systems. Spatial optical OFDM is also applied to a practical scenario where its PAPR reduction capability is used to improve the overall capacity of a proposed system that integrates power-line communication (PLC) and VLC. A low-complexity variant of SO-OFDM, that uses square-wave carriers and simplifies the transmitter design by eliminating the need for digital predistortion (DPD) and digital-to-analog converters (DACs) is also proposed, and tested experimentally.

Power Line Communication (PLC) technology provides the omnipresence of high speed data services without requiring the installation of new infrastructure. The existing household electrical wiring which is used to deliver the electrical energy to the house is utilized by the PLC technology as a transmission channel. The data rates of several hundreds of Mbps are realized by the PLC technology. In most developed countries the cable used for household electrical wiring consists of three wires: Phase (P), Neutral (N) and Protective Earth (PE). The existing PLC systems use the P-N port to transmit and receive the signals. It is a typical single input single output (SISO) transmission. The inclusion of the PE wire at transmit and receive outlets leads to the availability of multiple transmit/receive ports which in turn leads to the realization of a MIMO communication channel. The principle objective of this thesis is to study and explore the inhome PLC channels in the MIMO context. The main objectives of the thesis are categorized as the following: ¿ Development of a channel sounding protocol to perform extensive channel and noise measurements on the inhome PLC networks, with the objective of generating a rich and realistic database. Evaluation of the MIMO PLC channel capacity by utilizing the database obtained from the measurements. ¿ Characterization and modeling of the inhome MIMO PLC channel through a set of parameter by utilizing the measured channel data. Evaluation of the performance of the channel model by comparing the simulated channels parameters with the measured ones. ¿ Characterization and modeling of the MIMO power line noise through various parameters by utilizing the measured noise data. Evaluation of the performance of the noise model by comparing the simulated noise characteristics with the measured noise.

In this thesis, we are interested in a wide-area PLC (Power Line Communication) network to provide a communication infrastructure for monitoring and control of energy distribution and consumption. This work has been carried out as a part of REMPLI (Real-time Energy Management via Power Line and Internet) European project and resulted in the definition of REMPLI PLC. For achieving high network performance and real-time data transfer using medium voltage and low voltage electricity grids, major problems such as dynamic packet routing, quality of service management and real-time event reporting are addressed. We designed an efficient routing protocol to cope with dynamic electricity grid topology changes and to relay packets to reach the destination. REMPLI PLC performance is evaluated using simulations and complemented by analytic studies. It is proved that most of the application requirements can be satisfied by REMPLI PLC. We proposed and implemented a new traffic dispatcher providing differentiated quality of service for applications. Based on ALOHA protocol, some variants have been designed and evaluated for enabling efficient real-time event notification / Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons à la problématique liée à la communication numérique sur courant porteur dans l’objectif de fournir une infrastructure de communication qui permet la surveillance et le contrôle de la distribution et de la consommation de l’énergie. Ce travail a été effectué dans le cadre du projet européen REMPLI (Real-time Energy Management via Power Line and Internet) et a produit la spécification REMPLI PLC (Power Line Communication). Pour fournir une meilleure performance de la communication et effectuer le transfert de données en temps réel, en utilisant les réseaux électriques de moyenne tension et de basse tension, les problèmes principaux qui sont le routage dynamique de paquets de données, la gestion de la qualité de service et la notification des événement en temps réel, ont été traités. Nous avons développé un protocole de routage efficace pour s’adapter au changement dynamique de topologie du réseau électrique. Les performances de REMPLI PLC sont évaluées en utilisant des approches de simulation couplée avec des approches analytiques. Il est prouvé que la majorité des besoins applicatifs peuvent être satisfaite par REMPLI PLC. Nous avons proposé et implanté un nouvel “ordonnançeur de traffic” fournissant différents niveaux de qualité de service pour les applications. Des variantes de protocole ALOHA ont été proposées et évaluées afin de vérifier que les propriétés temps réel requises sur les notifications d’événements sont respectées

In this thesis, the conventional low voltage power line communication methods is investigated in the axis of automated meter reading applications and the classification and experimental verification of common noise types for low voltage power line communication network. The investigated system provides the real time transmission of electricity consumption data recorded by electricity meters, initially to a local computer via a low voltage line through a low speed PLC (Power Line Carrier) environment and subsequently to a corporate network through a high speed data transmission medium. The automated meter system provides a more effective tracking and data acquisition, a more detailed and vigorous knowledge about consumer behavior for subscriber assessment in electricity distribution in association with a brand new management and system supervision concept in electricity distribution control and management technology. The theoretical studies are experimentally verified for the Turkish low voltage power infrastructure through laboratory experiments performed in METU Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department, Electrical Machines and Drives Laboratory and R&amp / D Laboratories of MAKEL facilities in Hadimk&ouml / y. The single phase voltage of the mains line between the phase and neutral is monitored to exhibit the disturbing effects of various noise sources. The resulting voltage spectrum is logged by using digital data acquisition devices in time and frequency domain. The waveforms are converted to frequency domain using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) functions of the MATLAB. The experimental results are compared to the theoretical findings obtained through literature survey.

Η BPL τεχνολογία είναι μια υποσχόμενη τεχνολογία η οποία προσφέρει τηλεπικοινωνιακές υπηρεσίες μέσω των γραμμών ηλεκτρικής ενέργειας και η οποία τα τελευταία χρόνια γνωρίζει ραγδαία ανάπτυξη. Σκοπός της παρούσας διπλωματικής εργασίας είναι η παρουσίαση της BPL τεχνολογίας και η υλοποίηση της με τρεις διαφορετικούς τρόπους σε συγκεκριμένο ηλεκτρικό δίκτυο. Στο πρώτο κεφάλαιο γίνεται μια γενική αναφορά στην BPL τεχνολογία. Παρουσιάζονται τα επίπεδα του δικτύου ηλεκτρικής ενέργειας τα οποία συμμετέχουν σε ένα BPL δίκτυο, τα διάφορα δίκτυα πρόσβασης, οι αρχιτεκτονικές και ο εξοπλισμός τους, καθώς και διάφορα προβλήματα που αντιμετωπίζει η συγκεκριμένη τεχνολογία. Στο δεύτερο κεφάλαιο περιγράφονται τα επίπεδα του BPL δικτύου. Αναλύονται οι διάφορες τεχνικές διαμόρφωσης όπως η OFDM (ορθογώνια μέθοδος διαμόρφωσης με διαίρεση συχνότητας) και η διαμόρφωση απλωμένου φάσματος. Επίσης γίνεται αναφορά στη διαχείρηση σφαλμάτων, στο BPL MAC στρώμα καθώς και στα πρωτόκολλα 802.11. Στο τρίτο κεφάλαιο αναφέρονται οι διάφορες τηλεπικοινωνιακές υπηρεσίες που προσφέρονται από την BPL τεχνολογία καθώς και οι εφαρμογές του έξυπνου δικτύου (Smart Grid) και του έξυπνου σπιτιού (Smart Home) που υλοποιούνται με τη συγκεκριμένη τεχνολογία. Στο τέταρτο κεφάλαιο γίνεται μια σύντομη αναφορά στην τεχνολογία των οπτικών ινών και στο τρόπο με τον οποίο η τεχνολογία αυτή θα χρησιμοποιηθεί ως δίκτυο κορμού το οποίο θα φτάνει μέχρι και τους μετασχηματιστές μέσης/χαμηλής τάσης. Επίσης παρουσιάζεται και η PON-BPL τεχνολογία. Στο πέμπτο και τελευταίο κεφάλαιο πραγματοποιείται η σχεδίαση του BPL δικτύου πρόσβασης με τρεις διαφορετικές αρχιτεκτονικές σε περιοχή της Λακωνίας της οποίας το ηλεκτρικό δίκτυο ψηφιοποιήθηκε με τη χρήση ενός προγράμματος GIS (Γεωγραφικά Συστήματα Πληροφοριών) και συγκεκριμένα του Mapinfo. Στη συνέχεια γίνεται σύγκριση των αρχιτεκτονικών ως προς το κόστος και την ταχύτητα. / BPL technology is a promising technology that offers telecommunications services through power lines, which in the recent years is facing a rapid development. The object of this specific project is the presentation of BPL technology and its realization in three different ways on a specific power grid. In the first chapter there is a general reference to BPL technology. Also it includes a presentation of the levels of the power grid which participate in a specific BPL network. Furthermore there is a presentation of the various access network, their architectures, equipment and various problems faced by this technology. The second chapter contains the description of the levels of BPL network. Also various modulation techniques like OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) and spread-spectrum configuration are analyzed. Finally there is a reference to the management of errors, BPL MAC layer and to the protocols 802.11 as well. In the third chapter there is a reference about the various telecommunication services which are provided via BPL technology as well a reference for the implementations of the Smart Grid and Smart House which are realized with the specific technology. At chapter four a brief reference is conducted about the optical fiber technology and about the manner in which this technology will be used as a backbone which reaches up the medium/low voltage transformers. Also PON-BPL technology is presented. Finally in the fifth and last chapter takes place the design of BPL access network with three different architectures in an area of Laconia whose power grid digitized by using a GIS program (Geographic Information Systems), namely the Mapinfo. Eventually there is a comparison between architectures as concern the cost and the speed of realization needed.