Distributed Spectrum Sharing for Enterprise Powerline Communication Networks

As powerline communication (PLC) technology does not require dedicated cabling and network setup, it can be used to easily connect multitude of IoT devices deployed in enterprise environments for sensing and control related applications. IEEE has standardized the PLC protocol in IEEE 1901, also known as HomePlug AV (HPAV), which is widely adopted PLC standard. A key weakness of HPAV protocol is that it does not support any spectrum sharing strategies. Currently, each link in an HPAV PLC network operates over the whole available spectrum, and only one link can operate at any time within a single collision domain. We conducted a large scale measurement study using commodity HPAV PLC devices and analyzed channel characteristics of PLC networks in a real enterprise environment across space, time, and spectral dimensions. Based on our findings, we propose a distributed spectrum sharing technique for enterprise PLC networks, and show that fine-grained distributed spectrum sharing on top of current HPAV MAC protocols can boost the aggregated and per-link throughput by up to 60% and 250% respectively, by allowing multiple PLC links to communicate concurrently, while requiring a few modifications to the existing HPAV PLC devices and protocols.