Fountain Codes for Reliable Data Transmission in Low Voltage Power-line Networks

Home appliances are becoming information devices which can be networked to exchange information. Nonew-wires networks are the most promising candidate networking technologies to provide both residential and Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) networking services. Among them, broadband communication over power line networks has attracted much interest in academy and industry recently. The HomePlug Powerline Alliance has developed a new specification for in-home networking called HomePlug AV. The HomePlug AV MAC layer provides a connectionless, prioritized contention service based on CSMA/CA to support best-effort applications. When there are connections competing for the channel utilization, UDP connections lose a big amount of packets. In addition, the bidirectional nature of TCP protocol may not be the adequate transmission mechanism in a half-duplex channel. In this scenario, the use of Fountain codes could be a good alternative to UDP and TCP to transmit reliable data. Online Codes are a free-software Fountain codes version. In this work, it is evaluated the feasibility to use Online Codes for binary data transmission in a low-voltage PLC