Scheduling strategies for service admission in powerline communication access networks with QoS support

A Broadband Powerline Communications (BPLC) access network is a master-slave system, where a base station controls all the medium accesses of its slaves. Since this BPLC system supports for multi-users with multiple services, it requires a scheduler to manage the available network transmission capacity via a bandwidth broker, delivers the access right to the users based on their requests. The scheduler has to assure the QoS guarantee for each type of service in accordance with its requirements. In a system utilizing the TDMA access scheme, like the OPERA(1) system, the resource that the base station assigns to each user is the duration of the time slot for accessing the network. The problem of the scheduler arises when there is not enough available transmission capacity to satisfy all the requests from the users at the same time. Therefore, scheduling strategies are studied and proposed to find a good way to distribute resource to users and requested services. A heuristic algorithm to solve this scheduling problem is also proposed and analyzed.