Hierarchical Medium Access Control (HMAC) based on CSMA/CA for Powerline Communications

摘要

The power line medium is often referred as a fast time-varying channel whose line characteristic frequently changes without any notice. The level of the channel attenuation also greatly exceeds that of other communication media. Due to the limited-coverage nature of the power line channel, two major issues arise in the design of Medium Access Control (MAC) for broadband access through power line: the supportability of multi-master and repeater functions. The multi-master issue arises when there is a need for deploying multiple master stations or access points in a single physical network; each master station shall not interfere with each other and shall form a separate logical network. The repeater function is another feature that optimizes the coverage of PLC system by relaying received frames to remote stations that are invisible to the master station. In this paper we propose a multiple access scheme, so called Hierarchical Medium Access Control (HMAC), which supports both the multi-master and repeater functions.