Network-supported TCP rate control for high-speed power line communications environments

High-speed power line communications (PLC) technology has great potential to serve as an infrastructure for home networking. To investigate the performance of end-to-end data flows over high definition (HD)-PLC, we have developed a new module on the NS-2 network simulator for HD-PLC that is driven by the particular patterns of the time-varying packet-error-rate as measured by experiments. To solve the problem on coexisting multiple TCP flows, a novel network-supported TCP rate control that appropriately modifies the advertized-window value in a TCP-ACK packet in response to the PLC network condition is presented and is shown to be effective through simulations.