Although the power lines were designed to deliver electric power, not for communications, a large volume of research on Broadband over Power line communications (BPLC) had appeared over the decades. The successful transmission of data over the power lines will make the BPL technology a cost-effective solution for the so-called “last miles” in communication networks [1]. Recently, this effort received a significant boost by the approval of the IEEE P1901 standard [20]. This standard specifies the regulations for the operation of the Physical and MAC layers of the BPL network. It proposes two major MAC protocols – Time Division Multiplexing Access (TDMA) for the contention-free access and Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) for the contention access. In this thesis, we present the performance models of the contention-free access and the contention access mechanisms. For the contention-free transmission mode, we determine analytically the probability distribution of the number of beacon periods that it takes to transmit a MAC frame over multi-hop communications subject to transmission errors, then, we developed an analysis that determines the network capacity, the number of users that the system may support. Also, we determine the MAC efficiency of the network when it’s operating under both contention-free and contention mode. These results may be helpful in the design of BPL networks.
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