IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015 - 140

Product Reviews

Home Automation:
Insteon (X10 Meets Powerline)
By William Lumpkins

n our home of the near future, artificial-intelligence-enabled appliances
will make our lives simpler. These
innovations will include our smart
microwave/convection ovens downloading new cooking recipes, a thermostat
that automatically changes to its energy
saving set point when the security system is enabled, bathroom floors and
towel racks that heat up when the bath
runs, and our mobile phones alerting us
when someone has approached our
house to give us the option to allow
trusted friends/family inside. The market
for possible solutions for home automation are broken into two distinct camps,
wired and wireless. The wired camp
includes Ethernet, power line, and Home
PNA (IEEE 1901). The wireless camp
consists of 802.11 abgn/ac, (IEEE
802.15.1) Bluetooth, ZigBee, and X10
as well as a multitude of others.
Devices communicate with each
other using the Insteon protocol over the
air via radio frequency (RF) and over the
powerline (PL) as illustrated in Figure 1.
Electrical power is most commonly
distributed to homes in North America
as split-phase 220-V alternating current
(220 Vac). At the main electrical junction box to the home, the single threewire 220 Vac powerline is split into a
pair of two-wire 110 Vac power lines,
known as Phase 1 and Phase 2. Phase 1
wiring usually powers half the circuits
in the home, and Phase 2 powers the
other half.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2015.2463451
Date of publication: 29 October 2015

140 IEEE ConsumEr ElECtronICs magazInE

Insteon RF devices (Table 1) communicate with other Insteon RF devices
using the Insteon RF protocol, which is a
propriety 915 MHz RF protocol similar
to Z-Wave. Insteon PL devices communicate with each other over the powerline
using the Insteon Powerline protocol,
which is based on the X10 protocol.
Insteon dual-band devices use both the
Insteon Powerline protocol and the Insteon RF protocol, solving significant problems encountered by devices that can
only communicate one physical media.

All Insteon devices are
peers, meaning that any
device can act as a
controller (sending
messages), responder
(receiving messages),
or repeater (relaying
messages).
PL signals originating on the opposite
PL phase from a powerline receiver are
severely attenuated because there is no
direct circuit connection for them to travel over. A traditional solution to this problem is to connect a signal-coupling
device between the PL phases, either by
hardwiring it in at a junction box or by
plugging it into a 220 Vac outlet. Insteon
automatically solves the PL phase-coupling problem through the use of Insteon
dual-band devices capable of both PL and
RF messaging. Insteon RF messaging

october 2015

bridges the PL phases whenever at least
one Insteon Dual-Band device is installed
on each PL phase.
When suitably equipped with a dedicated serial interface, such as USB,
RS232, or Ethernet, Insteon devices can
also interface with the Internet, smartphones, tablets, personal computers, and
other digital equipment. In Figure 1, an
Insteon device is shown communicating
with a PC using a serial-link.
Serial communications can bridge
networks of Insteon devices to otherwise
incompatible networks of devices in a
home, to computers, to other nodes on a
local-area network (LAN), or to the
global Internet. Such connections to outside resources allow networks of Insteon
devices to exhibit complex, adaptive,
people-pleasing behaviors.
In Figure 2, network reliability
improves when additional Insteon
devices are added. The figure shows
Insteon devices that communicate by
PL only, RF only, and both (DB). For
simplicity's sake, we have only included two dual-band products.
As an example, suppose RF device
RF1 desires to send a message to RF3,
but RF3 is out of range. The message
will still get through, however, because
devices within range of RF1, say DB1
and RF2, will receive the message and
retransmit it to other devices within
range of themselves. In Figure 2, DB1
might reach RF2, DB2, and RF4, and
devices DB2 and RF1 might be within
range of the intended recipient, RF3.
Therefore, there are many ways for a message to travel: RF1 to RF2 to RF3 (one

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