Pervasive Energy Monitoring and Control Through Low-Bandwidth Power Line Communication

The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing rapidly, with increasingly sophisticated networking, sensing, and actuation functions embedded into everyday devices. One important IoT application is managing a building’s energy usage by monitoring and controlling its electrical devices. Many existing IoT-enabled devices operate through low-cost and convenient power line networks, using protocols such as X10 and Insteon for communication. However, as these technologies have traditionally targeted low-bandwidth device control, they are often not readily suited to higher bandwidth uses such as continuous energy monitoring. In this paper, we consider the challenge of leveraging existing low-bandwidth power line communication networks for energy monitoring, and present several techniques that enable reliable and high-resolution monitoring in such networks. As a case study, we consider the popular Insteon protocol and show that intelligent polling and event detection methods can reduce the bandwidth requirements and undetected power events in a real-world Insteon network by 50% or more versus naive methods. Our techniques have been employed in a real IoT-enabled smart home, which has collected much of the data publicly released in the UMass Smart* energy dataset.