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 has been widely adopted in mainstream PLC devices. A key weakness of HPAV protocol is that it does not support spectrum sharing. 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. In this work, through an extensive measurement study of HPAV PLCs in a real enterprise environment using commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) HPAV PLC devices, we discover that spectrum sharing can significantly benefit enterprise level PLC networks. To this end, we propose a distributed spectrum sharing technique for enterprise HPAV PLC networks, and show that fine-grained distributed spectrum sharing on top of current HPAV MAC protocols can significantly boost the aggregated and per-link throughput, by allowing multiple PLC links to communicate concurrently, while requiring only a few modifications to the existing HPAV devices and protocols.

中文翻译：

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企业电力线通信网络的分布式频谱共享

由于电力线通信 (PLC) 技术不需要专用布线和网络设置，因此可用于轻松连接部署在企业环境中的众多物联网设备，以实现传感和控制相关应用。IEEE 在 IEEE 1901 中对 PLC 协议进行了标准化，也称为 HomePlug AV (HPAV)，已被主流 PLC 设备广泛采用。HPAV 协议的一个关键弱点是它不支持频谱共享。目前，HPAV PLC 网络中的每条链路都在整个可用频谱上运行，并且在单个冲突域内任何时候都只能运行一条链路。在这项工作中，通过使用商品现货 (COTS) HPAV PLC 设备在真实企业环境中对 HPAV PLC 进行广泛的测量研究，我们发现频谱共享可以显着使企业级 PLC 网络受益。为此，我们为企业 HPAV PLC 网络提出了一种分布式频谱共享技术，并表明在当前 HPAV MAC 协议之上的细粒度分布式频谱共享可以通过允许多个 PLC 链接来显着提高聚合和每链路吞吐量同时通信，同时只需要对现有的 HPAV 设备和协议进行一些修改。