ABSTRACT
Over the past few years, people have witnessed an increasing interest in the use of power line communication (PLC) for home automation systems, automatic meter reading, real-time energy management systems, and many other applications. The measurements of vehicular power line communication (VPLC) channels, however, indicate that there are still a number of challenges for communications over power wires. This chapter reviews the state-of-the-art developments of related work, and emphasizes the motivation and importance of the work. It describes the system assumption, and presents a brief description of the media access control (MAC) protocol operation. The chapter provides mathematical analysis of the proposed MAC protocol, under the assumption of perfect sensing. It presents the mathematical analysis of the protocol with the presence of sensing errors. Characteristic measurements of the physical layer are often restricted by the access to vehicles for performing the measurement test. The chapter provides an example of the collision resolution algorithm performed between contending nodes on each channel.
