A hybrid relay control mechanism for ribbon topology in low-voltage power line communication networks

Summary The communication reliability and distance of the low‐voltage power line communication system are seriously affected by the channel interference and the time variant load impedance. Therefore, how to control the relay nodes to reduce the communication delay and improve the communication reliability is mainly considered in the design. A novel hybrid relay control mechanism (HRCM) that includes the static relay pre‐configuration and the dynamic relay selection is designed for the ribbon topology in the low‐voltage power line communication networks. In the ribbon topology, the initial configuration for the communication link is realized through the pre‐configure relay nodes, which guarantees that the concentrator can communicate with the furthest terminal node. During the normal operations, the dynamic relay node is selected according to the sequence number of the uplink or downlink data frame and the data discard strategy. With the relay node dynamical selected mechanism, the frame repeated transmission can be avoided and the communication delay is reduced. The actual test results show that the hybrid relay control mechanism can effectively extend the communication distance, improve the communication real‐time and the reliability of the low‐voltage power line communication. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This paper presents a novel hybrid relay control mechanism (HRCM), which is based on ribbon topology of the low‐voltage power line communication networks. The HRCM that a pair of master–slave relay nodes are defined by the master relay node and its corresponding slave relay node can reduce data conflicts through the data discard policy and the rational time allocation mechanism. By this means, the communication real‐time and reliability of the low‐voltage power line communication are effectively improved.