Patent ID: 8456285
Filing Date: 2013-06-04
Classification: G01D,Y02B,Y04S

Abstract:
1. In a power line communication systems for an electrical distribution network, a fast polling method for quickly and accurately polling electrical meters installed at user facilities to determine if an outage has occurred at a facility comprising: sending an outbound message over the network to a meter to ascertain whether or not an outage has occurred at the meter's location, the meter, if it receives the message, sending a fast poll response consisting of a known bit pattern; and, monitoring the network to detect the response and processing any perceived response to determine if the known bit pattern is present, presence of the known bit pattern indicative of the meter having received the fast poll message and that an outage has not occurred, while absence of the known bit pattern is indicative that the meter did not receive the fast poll method and an outage has occurred, processing of any perceived response being done using detection algorithms to minimize the probability of an error in determining whether or not an actual response was received and if an outage has or has not occurred, processing of any perceived response including detecting bits comprising the response using a correlation detector algorithm in which an output vector X of the correlation detector is defined as: where n is the number of reference bits, S is a matrix containing a predetermined number of samples of the transmitted bits, d is a column vector of a given dimension containing the transmitted data, and S