Performance Evaluation of an Efficient and Reliable Multicast Power Line Communication System

Power line communication technology receives today a renewed attention for a wide class of advanced applications and services, thanks to the advantage of using the existing electrical infrastructure, which requires only limited deployment costs. However, wires have been originally designed for power and not for data, and signal propagation is affected by several impairments such as impulsive noise and frequency selectivity. On the other end, new emerging application perspectives-mainly related to the smart grid or Internet of Things paradigms-need reliable unicast and/or multicast information delivery methodologies. This paper deals with an efficient multicast power line communication system based on the use of a decision direct impulsive noise mitigation scheme and of multiple transmissions of symbols in the frequency domain, allowing an efficient exploitation of the communication channel frequency diversity. The performance of the reliable multicast power line communication system is derived by resorting to the application of the absorbing Markov chain theory in terms of mean overall delivery delay and throughput, in relation to different application scenarios. Moreover, a suitable optimization procedure is also proposed here in order to achieve the best performance. The advantages of the proposed optimized reliable multicast power line communication system are finally validated by comparisons with a classical system.