Adaptive Rate Control and Contention Window-Size Adjustment for Power-Line Communication

Even though the power line is a wired medium, its channel characteristics are very different from that of conventional wired media, such as telephone and Ethernet as it is not designed for communications. Some characteristics of the power-line channel are that of the wireless channel, so most power-line communication (PLC) schemes use the carrier-sense multiple access with collision-avoidance protocol, which is popular in wireless communications, for random access. In addition, the power-line channel has some characteristics that are absent in wired and wireless channels. In this paper, we design a new PLC media-access control (MAC) protocol considering two different types of power-line noise models: 1) impulsive noise (generated by on-off switching of electronic devices) and 2) background noise. When a transmission error occurs, the transmitter in our proposal adjusts its transmission rate according to the receiver´s feedback and determines the contention-window size appropriately according to the current loading. Through extensive simulations, we verify that our proposed MAC scheme improves network throughput under various scenarios.