An Effectiveness Evaluation of PLC/WLAN Cooperative Transmission Scheme under Practical Network Environment

With the approval and publication of the IEEE 1905.1 standard in 2013, which was designed to enhance the in-home network technology interoperability, the future in-home networking tends to provide the integration between multiple home network technologies including IEEE 1901 - Broadband over Power Line Networks with the objective of achieving a ubiquitous coverage within the home. So far, we have proposed a cooperative transmission scheme between two of these technologies, Power Line Communication (PLC) and Wireless LAN (WLAN). In this scheme, the PLC technology devotes to send TCP-DATA packets by maximally utilizing its high data rate, whereas the WLAN technology devotes to send TCP-ACK packets with small size. In order to have the proposed scheme evaluated in a more realistic network environment, its performance should be investigated under the cases where bidirectional TCP flows coexist and adverse factor that influences on the communication performance such as cross-traffic exist in both PLC and WLAN as well. Therefore, in this paper we investigate how both bidirectional flows and cross-traffic impact on the proposed scheme. Through simulation results, regarding the first case we have shown that the attained performance is higher than the one obtained when only PLC environment is used. Moreover, in the latter one it has been observed that despite of the presence of heavy cross-traffic in the WLAN link the scheme does not have considerable performance degradation because of its robustness against TCP-ACK packet loss.