Broadband Powerline Communications Networks

Performance analysis of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems in dispersive indoor power line channels inflicting asynchronous impulsive noise

“…Power line communication (PLC) is one of attractive candidates for the so-called 'last mile' communications due to its cost efficiency, since it exploits the existing grid structure [1]. However, since the electrical supply networks have not been designed for data transmissions, they constitute a hostile propagation environment [2], where the multipath-induced dispersion and the impulsive noise (IN) are the two fundamental impediments in the way of high-integrity communications.…”

Efficient scheduling for PLC networks

“…Relevant research on the MAC layer for PLC has focused more on in-home networking [2,3]. The work presented in this Letter focuses on the 'last mile' problem, and introduces scheduling ideas which lead to significant improvements in network performance and user Quality of Service (QoS) compared to the Extended ALOHA [4,5] protocol, for powerline communication networks.…”

“…Proposed scheduling scheme: Orthogonal frequency division modulation (OFDM) has been outlined as one of the best candidates for application in PLC systems with higher data rates, because of its excellent bandwidth efficiency [4][5][6]. We consider an OFDM transmission system which uses a number of subcarriers distributed in a frequency spectrum.…”

“…We consider an OFDM transmission system which uses a number of subcarriers distributed in a frequency spectrum. The work presented in [4,5] proposed three extensions of the basic ALOHA protocol in order to improve its performance on the PLC network: (a) piggybacking, which leads to a decrease in the signalling delay; this is defined as the time needed for the realisation of the requesting procedure for the transmission of a packet and includes the transmission of a request message to the base station and the reception of its response regarding the access rights; (b) use of data channels for signalling (from [7]); (c) application of an adaptive backoff mechanism for user access to the signalling channel, as well as for user access to the data channels for signalling purposes.…”

“…However, we do not use the adaptive backoff mechanism proposed in [4,5] for users to select the slot in which they will transmit=retransmit their requests; instead, we propose three new ideas, two regarding the slot selection mechanism and one regarding the channel selection mechanism for a PLC access network.…”