CodePLC: um protocolo de network coding MAC para power line communication

Abstract

Recently, power line communication (PLC) has attracted interest of worldwide researchers. However, PLC systems face several challenges which degrade data communication quality. To overcome such issues, we propose CodePLC, a network coding PLC MAC protocol. We use a single relay node to intermediate communication, storing and forwarding linear combinations of PLC data packets. We evaluate CodePLC performance through simulations of a common topology for a PLC system based in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing whith Time Domain Multiple Access (TDMA-OFDM) under a wide range of scenarios. In summary, our results show that in a broadcast like transmission, the use of network coding enhances overall system performance. In fact, when compared to a traditional PLC system using multihop stop&wait MAC layer protocol, we have observed an peak of 110% goodput increase. Moreover, our protocol reduces in 71,4% network occupancy buffers. Finally, CodePLC reduces mean latency by four times.