Enhancing transmission efficiency of broadband PLC systems with In-Band Full Duplexing

In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of In-Band Full-Duplexing (IBFD) for Broadband Power Line Communication (BB-PLC) systems, to potentially double the throughput and spectral efficiency. IBFD accomplishes this through simultaneous bidirectional communication over the same powerline in the same frequency band, by applying echo cancellation (EC) to suppress the interference caused by the self-transmitted signal. In light of various EC schemes employed in Digital Subscriber Lines, Ethernet, co-axial cables and recently in wireless systems, we investigate the specific requirements and constraints in BB-PLC, and present solutions for an effective IBFD implementation for such systems. We then use our simulated EC gain values to examine the overall data rate gains obtained by IBFD under different channel attenuations and PLC noise conditions, to determine if we truly obtain a 100% increase in throughput at all conditions.