Performance evaluation of the G.hn PLC PHY layer

Simulation of the IP end-to-end communication system requires accurate models which include the layers 4 to 1 of the ISO/OSI protocol stack. Usually these models are an abstraction of the real system. In this paper we focus on the PHY layer of a G.hn [1] system over PLC and calculate its throughput with respect to the PHY layer parameters: forward error correction (FEC) block size, packet size, repetitions number, etc. The parameters setup influences the efficiency of the PLC network very much. The results show that correct parameter settings for the specific traffic and channel conditions may save either energy required for transmission or equipment costs. This gives the opportunity for efficient scheduling on the medium access (MAC) layer in terms of effective use of the transmission capacity.