J.D. Lee, K. Tripathi, H.A. Latchman, and J. McNair
Medium Access Control (MAC), power line communications (PLC), CSMA/CA, saturation throughput
Power line based communication systems (PLC) are gradually spread to local area networks and broad band power line with the advantage of high data rates, no additional wirings, and easy scalability. Home Plug 1.0 protocol is the most commonly used technology for power line communication. It uses carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) to provide a maximum MAC data rate of 14 Mbps. Just as in 802.11, the throughput performance of this scheme becomes critical when the number of users increases. In this paper, based on the original HomePlug 1.0, we propose an Optimal Constant Contention Window (OCCW) mechanism, which dynamically selects best fixed contention window size according to the estimate of the number of contending stations in the channel. An analytical and simulation framework is used to find the optimal values of contention window size for best performance. Also, we implement a node estimation algorithm that each station can implement independently to find the number of contending stations. This is shown to significantly enhance the MAC performance under saturation conditions.
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