A Study on Low Latency Serial Power Line Tunnels for Sensor Data Transmission

In systems where sensor data has to be forwarded to a host system, power line communication can be an alternative to wireless or wired bus solutions. Furthermore, a serial communication unit is present in almost every microcontroller. Therefore, there is a natural demand for cost efficient serial tunnels over power line, still marginally supported by industry. Especially when low latency is needed as for example in local interconnect networks or controller area networks. In this paper, several key points on serial tunneling over power line are discussed. A commercial available modem using quadrature phase shift keying, a direct sequence spread spectrum based modem and a straightforward, cost efficient, open source modem are compared. A brief description of the working principle is given. Practical use cases on two automotive vehicles are studied.