Fluctuation Request: A Fast Retransmission Scheme in Power Line Communication Network

Broadband power line communication (BPLC) access technology provides high speed data transmission capability for multimedia service in digital homes. However, because of the frequency and time-varying characteristics of the power line channel, unpredictable packet loss happens during service transmission; in order to guarantee the requirement of QoS and improve the throughput performance, an effective approach is to retransmit the lost packet by the NACK message indication. This paper proposes a fast retransmission method named fluctuation request, wherein the internal node located along the transmission path is invited into the work of retransmission. The algorithm is designed to work in the system suffered with burst or constant packet loss. Comparing with the traditional method that totally relies on the source node for the data retransmission, the proposed mechanism can reduce the retransmission step and improve the average target packet hit rate for both unicast and multicast services.