Application of a multi-carrier modulation to a nondeterministic MAC based home LAN and its effect on performance

Non-deterministic MAC (media access control) such as CSMA/CD (carrier sense multiple access/collision detection) is popular due to its simple mechanism in terms of maintenance and extensibility of the LAN. On the other hand, its performance is less predictable as its collision resolution period is not deterministic. Such non-deterministic nature makes it difficult to guarantee the QoS (quality of service) of real-time packets depending on collision resolution algorithms. This paper shows the performance improvement of a home LAN using CSMA/CD MAC through simulation and analytic estimation when multi-carrier modulation is applied to a collision resolution technique to utilise a redundancy in the frequency domain and compares it with the one of HomePNA 2.0 MAC in terms of throughput and delay.