ABSTRACT
The HomePlug standard was developed as an in-home network technology that would allow for existing electrical circuits to provide the transmission medium for interconnecting electronic devices. Since the initial HomePlug 1.0 specification was defined in 2001, millions of HomePlug products have been shipped worldwide. To minimize the effect of noise on the electrical wires used for transmission, the HomePlug 1.0 specification defines an adaptive channel allocation scheme. The HomePlug Media Access Control layer uses a virtual carrier sense (VCS) mechanism and contention resolution to minimize collisions. Under the HomePlug specification, a combination of physical carrier sense and VCS are used to determine if the medium is idle or busy and for how long. Under the HomePlug specification, nodes that have the highest priority available in a network contend for access during the contention window period, whereas all other nodes defer an access attempt.
