Performance Evaluation of Reservation MAC Protocols under Selective Disturbances in Broadband PLC Networks

Broadband PLC access networks have to operate with a limited signal power, which makes them more sensitive to disturbances. We can also expect that the disturbances differently affect particular network segments and with it, they can have different influence on network stations, depending on their position in a PLC access network. We show that a such selective disturbance scenario significantly decreases network performance. Therefore, we propose a protection mechanism to be applied within reservation MAC protocols for PLC networks to deal with this problem. It can be concluded that the protected protocol variants completely eliminates negative influence of selective disturbances.