Investigation of Real-Time Scheduling for Broadband PLC Networks

Abstract

Broadband Power line Communications (B-PLC) is an access technology which utilizes the low-voltage cables network to offer telecommunication services to the subscribers. In each PLC network cluster, one base station is designed to serve all the connected subscribers, which share the same channel to access the network. The access to the network is controlled by the scheduler implemented in the base station. This scheduler has to allocate the available resources to the users requiring a connection in the form of an allocation table. This allocation table has to take into account which kind of service is requested to provide the resources to the subscribers in accordance with the QoS requirements. In addition, the scheduler has to operate in real time. This task is especially important when the network capacity is not enough to fulfill the requirements from all the users. Therefore, the performance of the network strongly depends on scheduling strategy used to do the bandwidth allocation and the connection management. In this thesis, the strategies for scheduling based on the evaluation of the benefit of the solutions are studied. An Evolutionary Algorithm, NSGA-II, is used to maximize two confronted objectives, benefit and fairness, managing the constrained network capacity. In addition, a method to improve the execution time is included. The method implemented uses the previous allocation table to find the allocation for the new service requests, and several procedures to do this updating are studied in some different scenarios.