Improving the Data Transmission Throughput over the Home Electrical Wiring

Powerline communications (PLC) are receiving special attention since they use an already available and ubiquitous infrastructure. The main standard for PLC home networks is HomePlug. This work improves the throughput of HomePlug by modifying the medium access control sub-layer. The key idea is to define a fast collision avoidance mechanism where every station that wants to access the medium increments its contention window after sensing another ongoing transmission. The proposal reduces the number of collisions in the network improving the achievable throughput. We compared our mechanism to the original HomePlug standard through simulation and mathematical analysis. We verified that the improvement is independent from the packet size, the transmission rate and the number of nodes when the network is high loaded