CSMA/CA: Improvements of the contention window adaptation

Abstract

We study the Narrowband Power Line Communications (NB-PLC) system intended to be used for Smart Grid applications. The performance of such system highly depends on the implementation and the used techniques. In this paper the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer of a specific system with the Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) mechanism is studied. The main feature of the used technique is that it automatically adopts the parameters of the protocol to the dynamically changing network. We investigate the protocol and suggest the improvements that give a higher performance.