Reliable communications with Network Coding in narrowband powerline channel

Due to its wide availability narrowband powerline networks provide an interesting no-new-wires communication channel. Nevertheless, as powerline was not designed for data communication, its electrical characteristics make it a harsh environment for data transmission and prevents the deployment of services with high reliability requirements. This paper presents 3 main outcomes: (i) The characterization of the transmission error correlation among different nodes in a narrowband powerline network, which acts in favour of the cooperative schemes. (ii) Based on the conclusions obtained from real measurements campaign, we propose a new OSI-Layer2 scheme based on Network Coding to achieve reliable communications in narrowband powerline. (iii) We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed scheme validating its real implementation in an embedded system, and comparing the achieved performance improvement with different legacy ARQ schemes.