Periodic contention-free multiple access for broadband multimedia powerline communication networks

There is industrial intent to use powerline communication (PLC) networks in the home for delivery of multimedia data, with associated challenging quality of service (QoS) requirements. Existing protocols for PLC, for wireless networks, or even for wired networks cannot meet these challenges efficiently. This paper proposes and analyzes a new protocol designed to provide the high QoS needed for delivery of multiple multimedia streams in a PLC environment. The proposed protocol, periodic contention-free multiple access (PCF/MA), directly addresses the issues of asymmetric communication channel, hidden nodes and near-far effects. The proposed PCF/MA performance is analyzed theoretically and its performance is simulated. The results show that 85 Mbps MAC throughput is possible with 100 Mbps channel data rate, even when there are hidden nodes in the network. Through mathematical modeling and software simulation for tight bandwidth allocation, such a network can deliver up to 9 MPEG-2 video streams simultaneously without dropping any video frames, compared to 7 video streams using MCSMA/CA (Modified CSMA/CA).