Increasing the throughput of the HomePNA MAC protocol

The paper proposes a new mechanism to increase the HomePNA 2.0 MAC protocol throughput. First, we review the HomePNA (Home Phone-line Network Alliance) MAC protocol and its collision resolution mechanism. Then, we use simulations to evaluate the throughput of HomePNA using a module that we implemented in the ns-2 simulator We propose a priority aggregation mechanism that uses the eight HomePNA priority levels in a more efficient way. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism is able to increase the throughput up to 44%. Moreover, our mechanism does not require modifying the HomePNA specification, and can be easily implemented as a new sublayer above the MAC sublayer.