A channel allocation protocol for providing fairness between users in multi-cell PLC networks

The Power Line Communication (PLC) technique utilizes the available electricity power line for the transmission of the communication signal. A PLC network is configured as one or several clusters; each is a master-slave system, called PLC-cell. The transmission resource allocation problem between the PLC-cells is investigated in this paper. Because of the channel quality, e.g. impacted by noise injection, power line cable quality, cable length, and number of repeaters between a user and its master, the transmission capacity over the power line between a user and its master is usually different from the others. The proposed resource allocation scheme organizes the available resource between the cells dynamically during runtime while providing the fairness between the users in different cells in terms of their average transmission throughput. The allocation scheme takes the individual channel quality of each user into account while calculating the necessary transmission resource. The decisions on the allocation resource are made by the cooperation of the masters of the adjacent cells. In this paper, the proposed resource allocation scheme is described and some simulation results are presented and analyzed.