Advanced Bandwidth Brokering Architecture in PLC Networks

The bandwidth broker is a management instance inside a PLC system, which has the complete overview about the network topology, the actual reserved bandwidth on each link inside its domain and should ideally have also a real-time view of the available bandwidth on each link. The bandwidth broker acts as an intermediate unit for call setups in a way that a call with ensured quality has to send a signaling packet to the broker which then manages each node taking part in this connection and reserves the bandwidth percentage and delay constraints necessary for the requested quality. The signaling between the routers and the bandwidth broker is at the moment very rudimental and consists of simple UDP packets containing a string with the desired quality.