CSMA/CD in PLC: Test with full G.hn and IP/UDP protocol stack

In this paper, we advocate implementing carrier sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD) in the broadband power line communication (BB-PLC) standard, G.hn, and show the gain in data rate obtained over carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). The use of CSMA/CD is made feasible due to the recent implementation of in-band full duplex operation in BB-PLC. We provide this implementation on a G.hn model using the NS-3 simulator, which we have made available as open-source. Our G.hn model implements physical and data link layers, including repeating function that makes it possible to simulate the long line network topologies (e.g., the network for electricity metering purpose). We also add IP/UDP layers to accomplish the higher layer protocol stack. We also provide analytical calculations of efficiency gains and validate them through our simulation results. We show that the highest achievable data rate with CSMA/CD is up to 5% higher than with CSMA/CA. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the protocol with CSMA/CD is less dependent on the number of active senders and has a smaller range of optimal contention window sizes (CW) for the same range of active senders, in comparison to CSMA/CA. This also simplifies the protocol implementation as the back-off algorithm for CSMA/CD does not vary CW as much as for CSMA/CA.