Transmission Scheduling for Multi-Hop Power Line Communication Networks

Power line Communications (PLC) has gained a lot of interest for the last mile or access because the normal electric power line is utilized for transmission also communication signals. Considerable research effort has been extended on investigating the technologies about the physical (PHY) layer and the medium access control (MAC) layer. But the transmissions scheduling is still a key design problem, especially in multi-hop PLC networks. In this paper, a time slot reuse schedule (TSRS) is proposed, to scheduled access in the networks. It utilizes time slots assignment with special reuse for the nodes in the cell, to improve the channel efficiency. TSRS is an appealing concept for PLC networks, since there is always a manager controlling the network, and PLC networks are often master slave structure with tree topologies. For successfully preventing the potential collision between the nodes, the performance of networks is improved significantly, which is also corroborated by the simulation results.