Analytic performance comparison of routing protocols in master-slave PLC networks

In wide area master-slave PLC (powerline communication) systems, the source node cannot reach the destination node without packet relay. Due to the random channel characteristics in the powerline, the communication distance in terms of the number of repeaters between two nodes is not constant. So two kinds of dynamic repeater algorithms are developed: dynamic source routing and flooding-based routing. In this paper, we use analytic approach to compare the performance of those two routing protocols. We give formulas to calculate the average duration of a polling cycle for each protocol. Then we present simulation results to bolster the results of our analysis. Other metrics such as the bandwidth ratio occupied by routing protocol and the routing overhead within a packet have also been evaluated. Our results have shown that our flooding-based routing protocol always outperforms our dynamic source routing one in general.