Medium access control and layers above in PLC

Power lines provide a shared communication channel so that medium access control (MAC) and protocols that reside above the physical layer have to be implemented. This chapter describes such protocols, summarizes the MAC principles and considers a power line communication (PLC) network organized in multiple cells. In such a scenario, media access schemes and resource sharing strategies among the cells for broadband PLC are discussed. The problem of allocating resources in a single cell multiple-user network is considered. The achievable rate of the multiple-access and the broadcast channel is discussed considering both time division multiple access (TDMA) and frequency division multiple access (FDMA). The resource allocation problem is addressed for the specific PLC channel that exhibits a periodically time variant response with cyclostationary noise. Finally, the chapter presents usage of cooperative communication mechanisms, such mechanisms can be implemented through a tight connection with the physical layer.