Market based bandwidth brokering architecture in PLC networks

Management instance inside a PLC system is a bandwidth broker. It has complete overview of the network topology and actual reserved bandwidth on each link inside its domain and should ideally also have a real-time view of the same. It is an intermediate unit for call setups in a way that a call with ensured quality has to send a signaling packet to the broker. That signaling packet then manages each node taking part in this connection and reserves the bandwidth percentage and delay constraints necessary for the requested quality. In market based environment the key components are a bandwidth broker that puts the supply of available bandwidth on a virtual market, and utility functions for each media, which are used to calculate the relative gain they can offer the user by using this bandwidth.