Modeling approach of broadband in-home PLC in network simulator 3

A modeling of communication networks is often done in hierarchical way. So, in PLC there are multiple models of channel, physical, datalink and other layers, which are realized separately in multiple programming environments. Nevertheless it is often advantages to do a cross-layer optimization of communication protocols. For this purpose multiple separate models have to be unified in one simulation environment. This paper describes a modeling approach of the PLC channel, the topology generator, the physical and datalink layer in ns-3 together. With this approach the authors show that Linear-Periodic Time-Variant (LPTV) property of the PLC channel is useful to be considered for the design of MAC scheduler. The developed simulator is set up for in-home PLC environment. It means that noise, impedance models and topology generator are described as stochastic models, which base on statistical measurement results in this environment.