Frequency domain access control for power line communications in home area networks

Home area networks (HANs) form the consumer-end installations of a smart-grid communication network. A prominent technology for providing connectivity within a HAN is power line communications (PLC), which equips the network with a readily available communication infrastructure. Broadband PLC (BB-PLC) solutions offer sufficiently high data rates for a multitude of tasks required to be performed in a HAN environment. However, typical BB-PLC networks applying a conventional carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) medium access control (MAC) protocol, such as that described in the HomePlug Green PHY (HPGP) standard, may collapse in HANs with a large number of users due to poor MAC efficiency. The use of in-band full duplex (IBFD) operation alleviates this network congestion by providing a means to implement CSMA with collision detection (CSMA/CD) to avoid the long collision recovery time. In this paper, we propose methods to further improve the MAC efficiency under a CSMA/CD operation for typical HANs by implementing the priority and contention resolution procedures of the HPGP protocol in the frequency domain. We show through network simulation results that our proposed schemes reduce the time consumed for resolving priorities and contentions by up to 85%.