OFDMA CSMA/CA protocol for power line communication

The channel response and noise in the power line channel show periodic behaviors since electric devices, which are major noise sources, synchronously run with the AC line cycle. Using the multichannel characteristics of orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) for the random access scheme, the power line communication (PLC) can improve system throughput. In this paper, we propose a carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol for OFDMA based PLC systems. Our proposed protocol divides the whole bandwidth into several sub-channels, and each station joins its best sub-channel. Each sub-channel performs CSMA/CA independently reducing the collision probability and enhancing the system throughput. Through extensive simulations, we verify our proposed protocol improves the system throughput under various environments.