Transmission Scheduling between Users in 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 taken on investigating the technologies. But the transmission scheduling is still a key design problem in the PLC networks. In this paper, a transmission scheduling for providing fairness (FTRS) between users is proposed. It assigns the users time slots with special reuse and makes them achieve fair transmission speed. So that the users can achieve the goal of a relative high throughput, as well as the fairness of channel share. FTRS 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. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol can achieve a trade-off between the high throughput and the fairness of channel share in PLC networks.