Performance Analysis of MAC for Power-Line Communications

We investigate the IEEE 1901 MAC protocol, the dominant protocol for high data rate power-line communications. 1901 employs a CSMA/CA mechanism similar to – but much more complex than – the backoff mechanism of 802.11. Because of this extra complexity, and although this mechanism is the only widely used MAC layer for power-line networks, there are few analytical results on its performance. We propose a model for the 1901 MAC that comes in the form of a single fixed-point equation for the collision probability. We prove that this equation admits a unique solution, and we evaluate the accuracy of our model by using simulations.