Investigation on Heterogeneous Power line Communication for Home Area Networking

Home networking is becoming an attractive application not only for the Internet access but also for home automation. Hence applications over powerline communication (PLC) networks have drawn much interest in the communication industry, not only because of inherent convenience (no new wires), but almost all electrical devices have to connect to a power outlet eventually. At the physical layer the promising methods for improving inferior characteristics of the PLC system are orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and forward error correction (FEC). The performance analysis of the integrated PLC and visible light communication (VLC) systems using OFDM and turbo codes, under multipath channel conditions has been investigated. To increase the performance of the PLC networks a new hybrid protocol namely virtual slot multiple access (VSMA) has been investigated to improve the QoS for the home networks. An adaptive backoff mechanism has been proposed to enhance the performance of hybrid protocol. The proposed hybrid system has been analyzed for variable packet sizes and its performance metrics has been evaluated. The analysis has been made to choose an optimal packet size, to make the system more resistance under impulse noise and make it backward compatible with the existing technologies. The proposed hybrid scheme enhances the MAC throughput and reduces the access delay for various services as compared with the conventional protocol.