Throughput improvement for power line communication by adaptive MAC protocol

In a multi-user power line communication (PLC) home network, there are several methods to decide who has the right to use the channel to send data. Basically, there are two kinds of scheduling schemes: coordinated and contention-based. For coordinated scheduling scheme, the manager of PLC network, called domain master, will arrange available medium for users according to network resources and users' requirements. The other scheduling scheme, called contention-based, is that users contend for the medium in a transmission opportunity (TXOP) and the user who wins the contention can transmit a data frame or a data frame sequence. In this paper, we propose an adaptive MAC protocol by adjusting data rate and contention window size based on users' defer situations and channel conditions to improve the system throughput. We provide a theorem to show the limit of throughput achievable by the proposed system and perform extensive simulation to verify that the proposed MAC protocol can indeed improve the system throughput by 45% in PLC home networks.