Performance Evaluation Of Multiple Access Techniques For Broadband Power Line Communication Systems

ABSTRACT

Powerline communication (PLC) is a promising technique for information transmission using existing power lines. Broadband over power lines is the way of providing internet services to customers using high frequency signals integrated in the power wiring. The internet signals are modulated and coupled into the overhead power lines. The signals are decoupled at the consumer’s premises. BPL can be a solution for people living in any rural area where there is electricity, since the cost of laying cables and building the necessary infrastructure to every house is too high, BPL can serve to cut down the costs by eliminating the need for laying new infrastructure. A multiple access scheme of the MAC layer establishes a method of dividing the transmission resource into accessible sections. Multiple access techniques divide up to the total signaling resource into channels and then assign these channels to different users. The most common ways to divide up the transmission medium are along the time, frequency and/or code axes. In this research FDMA and TDMA are the two multiple access schemes which are taken into consideration. Their performances under different channel conditions have been found. The channel conditions considered are low, medium and high disturbances. It was found that TDMA performs better than FDMA under all these channel conditions.