Efficient access control for power line communication networks

Broadband power line communications (BB-PLC) reuse power line infrastructure to provide high-speed and high-penetration data transmissions, which make BB-PLC an attractive solution to in-vehicle networks (IVNs) and home area networks (HANs). However, there still exist many research issues that need to be addressed before we can readily apply BB-PLC to these two application scenarios. To partially address these issues, the thesis proposes some efficient access control schemes by extending a popular BB-PLC protocol, HomePlug AV (HPAV). The latency performance of the original HPAV protocol is not satisfactory for IVNs. Thus, we introduce the Virtual Collision (VC) mechanism as an enhancement to the HPAV random back-off procedure to reduce the queuing latency. In addition, the relationships between transmissions of different classes of network traffic involved in an IVN are not well handled by the strict priority transmission selection algorithm (TXSA) specified in the HPAV protocol. In this regard, we propose to combine the strict priority TXSA with the Audio Video Bridging credit-based shaping (CBS) TXSA. The efficiency of the HPAV medium access control (MAC) layer is restricted by various MAC overheads, which makes the deployment of BB-PLC in a HAN less attractive. We use the emerging in-band full duplexing capability to enable two new techniques, Mutual Preamble Detection (MPD) and Contention Free Pre-sensing (CFP) to reduce these overheads. Then, aiming to provide a unified solution to support various HAN applications, we develop an interface with prioritization and traffic shaping to accommodate the heterogeneous network traffic involved. We use OMNeT++, a discrete event simulator, to verify the effectiveness of our proposed schemes, by comparing the network performance with our proposed schemes to that of the original HPAV protocol. The simulation results show that VC satisfactorily reduces queuing latency, the new TXSA better handles different priorities, MPD works well with CFP to improve MAC efficiency and the developed interface functions properly. While there still exist many research issues before we can exploit the full advantages of BB-PLC, our proposed schemes bring us one step closer towards that goal.Applied Science, Faculty ofElectrical and Computer Engineering, Department ofGraduat