Modeling of contention-free MAC protocol for broadband power line networks

Broadband power line (BPL) networks is promising access networks of the future due to their low cost and availability of the infrastructure. Recently, this effort received a significant boost by the approval of the IEEE P1901 standard. This standard proposes two basic MAC protocols for communication over power lines: contention-free, TDMA, and contention based, CSMA/CA, access mechanisms. In this paper, we present a performance model of the contention-free access mechanism. We determine analytically the probability distribution of the number of beacon periods that it takes to transmit a MAC frame over multi-hop communications subject to transmission errors. In this paper, we developed an analysis that determines the network capacity, the number of simultaneous frames that the system may serve.