Rate adaptation scheme in power line communication

The power line channel is similar to the wireless channel as both are shared medium, thereby transmitting and receiving can not happen simultaneously. However they have different dynamic characteristic. The power line channel does not have fast fading while the wireless channel has. It has impulsive noise while the wireless channel does not have. To reflect these characteristic, we propose a novel rate adaptation scheme in power line communication. Our proposed scheme consists of three procedures: NACK with reason, increase ACK, and fast retransmission. The key idea of our proposed scheme is that the receiver feedbacks the channel information through NACK or ACK message, which makes the transmitter choose proper rate according to the channel condition. The simulation result shows that our proposed scheme adjusts the transmission rate very well to achieve high throughput under various scenarios.