ABSTRACT
The in-home network of the future will be a hybrid network where multimedia contents must be provisioned over a stable broadband backbone (as described in Chapter 15). In agreement with this vision, in the past years, the HomePlug Alliance had released the HomePlug AV 1.1 (HPAV 1.1) specification [4]. This solution allows achieving a maximum throughput of 200 Mbit/s over the power line (PL; see also Chapter 13). Today, the market demand requires a migration to a much higher performance in order to support applications like high-definition multimedia contents and gaming. To accommodate the request for this increase in capacity, reliability and coverage, the HomePlug Alliance has 90defined the specification for the next generation of PL technology, namely, HomePlug AV 2.0 (HPAV 2.0) (see Chapter 14). One of the major enhancements related to this technology is the introduction of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique. This technique has already attracted attention in wireless communications (see, e.g.the standards IEEE 802.11n [5] and 3GPP LTE [6]).MIMO applied to PL, as already analysed in the literature, addresses either the channel capacity [7,8] or the performance of different MIMO schemes [9,10] (see Chapter 9). Moreover, MIMO PL channels are also addressed in [11–18]. An introduction to PL channel and noise characterisation is provided in Chapter 1, where the most representative in-home. PL models that can be found in recent literature are summarised. More details on the characteristics of the MIMO channel are presented in this chapter and in Chapter 5. In the literature, the characteristics of the PL noise have not been widely discussed; in many contributions, it is simply assumed to be additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The main results suggested that the in-home PL channel capacity can be increased by a factor of around 2 when MIMO techniques are applied.
