DEVICE AND FRAME STRUCTURE FOR POWERLINE COMMUNICATIONS

• US 20150319272A1
• Filed: 07/14/2015
• Published: 11/05/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 05/11/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Texas Instruments, Inc.
• Original Assignee: Texas Instruments, Inc.
• Inventors: Varadarajan, Badri N., Dabak, Anand, Kim, Il Han
• Granted Patent: US 9,667,318 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: H04B 3/54 Systems for transmission via power distribution lines
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 1/0041 Arrangements at the transmitter end
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 1/0071 Use of interleaving interleaving per se H03M13/27
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 69/22 Parsing or analysis of headers
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 69/323 in the physical layer [OSI layer 1]

Abstract

Embodiments of the invention provide a device and a frame structure for powerline communications. The header may comprise two parts that are separately encoded. A common header segment is encoded alone, and an embedded header segment is encoded with payload data

Claims

1-22. -22. (canceled)

23. A device for encoding a physical (PHY) frame, said device comprising:

a header generation circuit for generating a header with a set of common header bits and a set of embedded header bits;

a header encoder circuit comprising;

a forward error correction encoder for providing the header with a common header segment using the common header bits; and

a payload encoder circuit comprising a forward error correction encoder for providing a data segment that includes an embedded header segment generated from the set of embedded header bits.

24. The device of claim 23, wherein the common header segment includes data identifying the length of the payload segment.

25. The device of claim 23, wherein the embedded header segment and the payload portion are encoded using a same modulation and coding scheme.

26. The device of claim 23, wherein the embedded header segment includes separate cyclic redundancy check data.

27. A physical (PHY) frame for use in powerline communications (PLC), said frame, comprising:

a preamble;

a data portion containing;

an embedded header, encoded with a robust modulation and coding method for providing a PLC device instructions with instructions regarding identification information (ID);

a payload portion;

a common header, encoded with a robust modulation and coding method for providing the PLC device instructions on the length of the payload portion.

28. The physical (PHY) frame of claim 27, wherein the common header contains an length of the embedded header.

29. The physical (PHY) frame of claim 28, wherein the length information is replaced with a packet type if there is a unique mapping between the packet type and the embedded header length.

30. The physical (PHY) frame of claim 27, wherein the embedded header is embedded with separate cyclic redundancy check (CRC).

31. The physical (PHY) frame of claim 27, wherein the embedded header signals a source ID and a domain ID.

32. The physical (PHY) frame of claim 30, wherein a first K bits of the CRC are masked to provide a destination ID (or equivalent broadcast group ID) is sent implicitly by masking the.

33. The physical (PHY) frame of claim 32, wherein a first K bits of the CRC are masked to provide a broadcast group ID.