Power Line Communication as Alternative for Data Communication Channel for BRT

Abstract

The goal of intelligent transportation system (ITS ) for Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is to improve public transportation in relation to safety, usability, mobility, quality and productivity through the use of information and communication technology and one of the main problems is to ensure that which elements of ITS such as buses, sensors, actuators, traffic lights, among others are exchanging data with them, due to the size of this environment, the infrastructure of communication between the transportation management system (TMS) and ITS components is extremely important in this context, this work proposes the use of communication technologies called Power Line Communication (PLC) system, which consists of data communication through the grid network that is available in urban center. Another characteristic of ITS for BRT is that the environment will exchange small data packages, so it is possible to use narrow band technologies. In this paper was considered the evaluation of two initiatives on narrow band PLC, PRIME and G3, which have similar physical layer, and the PRIME privileges the high data rates during favorable conditions and G3 provides better performance on unfavorable conditions. The both projects can be used as a communication data channel for communication between BRT ITS elements, because this communication requests a low bit rate.