Video Streaming Over In-Home Power Line Networks

The deployment of power line communication technology for broadband video streaming remains a challenge because power lines are not originally designed for signal transmission. Scalable video is a viable approach that can cope with the bandwidth fluctuation of power line communication networks provided that the bandwidth information is available. In this paper we first investigate how the interference caused by electrical appliances or power supplies affects the power line channel bandwidth and packet transmission. Then we take the obtained characteristics of in-home power line network into account in the design of a simple but effective heuristic-based application-layer bandwidth estimation scheme, for which the cutoff rate is estimated from the packet size and the physical-layer data rates. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can effectively combat the noise interference and deliver robust video streaming over power line.