Rateless codes for reliable data transmission over HomePlug AV based in-home networks

With the appearance of peer-to-peer networks and the rapid progress being made in the technologies used to deploy them, in-home networks are likely to play a highly important role in what is being called the Future Internet. There are different candidate technologies to widespread an in-home network. Among them, broadband communications over power line networks have attracted much interest in academy and industry recently. However, there are several aspects of the PLC medium that make it difficult to share resources fairly, such as timevaying behaviour or the broadcast nature of the channel. For these reasons TCP protocol may not be the adequate mechanism for reliable data transmission over PLC networks. In this work, the main characteristics of the PLC channel and the feasibility of using rateless Codes for reliable data transmission in these kind of networks are evaluated. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.