New performance estimation scheme and applications for broadband communications over power lines in the home

The IEEE 1901 broadband over power line (BPL) standard was finalized and published in December 2010. The BPL modem can attain speeds of up to 200 Mbps when used in the house. However, the BPL substantial data transmission rate varies depending on the power line wiring diagram and noise sources. In this paper, we propose a new simple estimation scheme named Branch Model Attenuation Estimation (BMAE) that can approximate the attenuation for all point-to-point connections including those in complex networking topologies. In addition, we verify its effectiveness on the basis of measurement results for the PLC House, which is a realistic house environment for experiments built by Panasonic. Furthermore, an approximation of the transmission rate is experimentally derived from the attenuation, and the relationship between a real power line wiring diagram and the PLC transmission rate is revealed. We demonstrate the usefulness of the modem relay network using the BMAE scheme.