Multiple Domain Bi-directional Scheme with Network Coding at the Physical-layer for G.hn Applications

The international Telecommunication Union (ITU) G.hn standard defines high speed in-house network access via different domains corresponding to the three home legacy wires (telephone, coax, and power lines). Although, the G.hn standard provides a relaying scheme that allows a device to receive and deliver messages to and from nodes in order to provide wider range for large networks, this can only happen within the same domain. The much needed bi-directional communication between different domains is currently not supported. The specifications within the current standard are not sufficient to address the needs and fulfill the requirements of the various Broadband Multimedia and Smart Home/Building services. This paper advances the G.hn standard by proposing a multi-domain bi-directional network with network coding at the physical-layer. The focus is to increase network performance with reduced collisions for inter-domain network access. In order to efficiently implement the scheme, the current logical link control stack (LLC) has been extended to include additional functionalities to enable this particular type of communication. The benefit of the proposed architecture is improved network performance between a pair of devices from different domains due to efficient spectrum utilization, while maintaining the quality of service (QoS) for both user devices.