State-of-the-art in Power Line Communications: from the Applications to the Medium

In recent decades, power line communication has attracted considerable attention from the research community and industry, as well as from regulatory and standardization bodies. In this article we provide an overview of both narrowband and broadband systems, covering potential applications, regulatory and standardization efforts and recent research advancements in channel characterization, physical layer performance, medium access and higher layer specifications and evaluations. We also identify areas of current and further study that will enable the continued success of power line communication technology.Comment: 19 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. Special Issue on Power Line Communications and its Integration with the Networking Ecosystem. 201

A framework for cross-layer measurement of 3G and Wi-Fi combined networks

3G networks and Wi-Fi networks could complement each other as each has different advantages of coverage and access capacity. A combined 3G and Wi-Fi network is one part of a heterogeneous IP network which has ubiquitous access capacity. However, the characteristics of the lower layers in the wireless network portion of such a heterogeneous IP network could significantly affect the performance of higher layers, and further, the overall performance of the whole network. A single-layer approach to performance analysis could not provide enough information to present the correlation between lower and higher layers. A cross-layer measurement approach for combined 3G and Wi-Fi network is presented which aims to correlate the characteristics of the physical layer (e.g. channel power and signal-to-interference ratio) to key parameters of higher layer (e.g. packet-loss ratio, and round trip time)