A distributed MAC protocol for in-vehicle power line communication under imperfect carrier sensing

The presence of time-varying frequency-selective channels and impulsive noises renders the design of MAC protocols for in-vehicle power line networks challenging. It is then important to understand the impact of carrier sensing errors, i.e., false alarm and miss detection on the performance of the MAC layer. This paper attempts to model the effect of carrier sensing errors on the performance of a contention-based MAC protocol, called selective tournaments, well suited for in-vehicle power line communication. We start with addressing the problem of detection of unknown signals in impulsive noise by using a robust detector, which first removes the impulses from the signal and then performs energy detection on the cleaned samples. We then obtain the network throughput and delay as a function of carrier sensing errors. Finally, numerical results are presented to demonstrate the sensitivity of the network throughput and delay with respect to the sensing threshold.