A fast retransmission mechanism in power line communication network

Broadband power line communications (BPLC) network is regarded as a promising technology to provide high quality audio/video services in digital homes. However, the frequency and time-varying characteristics of the channel in PLC network will cause unpredictable packet loss during the transmission, so that the retransmission is inevitable in order to guarantee the service integrity. This paper proposes a fast retransmission method by introducing the internal node to join the work of retransmission based on the packet loss indication from the destination node. The proposed mechanism can be deployed in the system suffered with burst or constant packet loss. Comparing with the traditional retransmission method which totally relies on the source node, the proposed mechanism can reduce the retransmission step and improve the target packet hit rate for both unicast and multicast services.