A media access control method for high-speed power line communication system modems

Audio/video (AV) devices capable of IP communications over Ethernet are evolving into ubiquitous network home appliances. However, cabling an Ethernet network in existing dwellings is a difficult challenge that hinders their popularization. To overcome this obstacle, we have focused our attention on high-speed power line communications technology, which enables 100Base-T class IP networking using existing power lines as the communication medium. However, power line channel characteristics are fairly unstable and it is very difficult to provide stable transport of mixed streams (such as video contents, voice-over-IP, audio and data transfers) requiring different communication quality. We propose a real time error handling technique to alleviate the effects of errors by quickly responding to changes in power line channel characteristics and a MAC (media access control) technique to guarantee the transmission of buffered data using intelligent TDMA (time division multiple access). Through simulation results, we verify that the proposed techniques achieve stable AV stream transport.