PINGO Power-line Communication

The third media for device to device communication

In the building cellars of Norway thousands of PINGO devices are retrieving energy data every hour

When wireless fail, PINGO can do it

THE PROBLEM

IoT normally rely on two methods for data communication:

Wirless (Wi-Fi, WINGO, Zigbee, Bluetooth, etc).
Dedicated wires (Ethernet, twisted pair, etc.)

Often neither of these media can be used due to concrete walls, metal

cabinets, building shadows or absence of suitable cables.

Security can also be an issue with wireless communication in some cases.

THE SOLUTION

PINGO adds the third media for device communication. This is Narrow Band Power Line Communication (N-PLC).

N-PLC utilizes the existing electricity-wires in buildings and streets for data-transfer. N-PLC is a known technology for decades, but has been regarded as unreliable and difficult to use.

PINGO is a field tested technology for many years.
Examples:

It collects energy, water, oil and gas consumption from over thousand buildings in Norway, every hour, every day of the year. The data is used for energy management to gain up to 33% savings.
It has been used for street-lighting with excellent results.
The PINGO technology is used to control irrigation systems in America.
etc.

PINGO is known to be robust even in the harshest power-line environment. Encapsulating the PINGO technology in the DINGO software stack makes it simple to use. The PINGO protocol complexity is hidden for the user in the DINGO software stack.

One big advantage using PINGO is the simplicity of installation. As soon as a PINGO enabled device gets power, it also communicates. Because of this nature of PINGO, some customers prefer it over wireless although wireless would work in the same environment. The reason is simply less installation work, less cost.

N-PLC MARKET

N-PLC is a part of the exponentially growing IoT market. The N-PLC market was estimated to be 30 million units in 2015, expanding to 250 million units in 2020 at CARG 65% ($1 billion to $4 billion at CARG 26%).

Currently Europe is the largest N-PLC market. Asia–Pacific is growing.

Today PINGO is a working N-PLC solution that fulfils the strict EU-regulations for public N-PLC, while competitors are struggling.

PINGO IMPLEMENTATION

By hardware PINGO is implemented as a DINGO plug-in. This plug-in can be installed either in a DINGO Base Board (DBB) or into DINGO Pass-through Modem.

PINGO is a master-slave technology. That is to say a single master always initiates a communication to slaves. The slaves form a mesh network, extending the communication range to tenths and even hundreds of kilometers.
Broadcasting a message to a group of slaves in one command is possible. Very practical for example in lighting control.

For working on all 3 phases of a 3-phase power-line network, 3 plug-ins have to be installed in the master DBB, but just single plug-in is needed in the slave DBBs (or Pass-through Modem).

The DINGO software stack implements a very powerful support for PINGO in it's Peripheral Manager. In addition it implements a so called APDU-to-APDU BACnet Virtual Gateway. This is because N-PLC technology is "narrow", or simpler said, "slow". The gateway overcomes the slow communication, by buffering values from multiple slaves in the master DINGO. By doing that the data in the slaves is immediately ready when requested from any BACnet client. Similar approach is used when writing to a PINGO slave.
Implementing this gateway makes it possible for PINGO enabled devices to show up as normal BACnet devices behind a BACnet router.

More about the PINGO plug-in in section 5 here...
More about the DINGO Passthrough Modem products here...
More about the BACnet APDU to APDU Virtual Gateway in section 5 here...