Sub‐channel assignment and link schedule for In‐Home power line communication network

Abstract

To offer communication capability in an easy and simple deployment, power line communications (PLCs) have recently attracted interest from the smart grid. The effective sub-channel assignment can increase throughput of In-Home (IH) PLC networks with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing scheme distributed over low-voltage areas. Given a logical topology of an IH PLC network, the authors present a formulation to optimise the sub-channel assignment problem as a linear programming with an objective function of maximising the network throughput. It takes into account constraints of the network topology, interference and traffic fairness. According to the solution of the optimising sub-channel assignment problem, the scheduling algorithm of links to obtain channels is developed for every time slot. Evaluation demonstrates that the proposed approach performs much better in improving overall network throughput and ensuring the traffic fairness of network users than conventional ones.