HIGH SPEED MULTIMEDIA HOME NETWORKING OVER POWERLINE Haniph A. Latchman 1 , K. Afkhamie 3 , S. Katar 3 , R. E. Newman 2 , B. Mashburn 3 , L. Yonge 3 1 ECE Department, University of Florida, Gainesville FL 32611 2 CISE Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611 3 Intellon Corporation, 5100 W. Silver Spring Blvd., Ocala, FL, 34482 Abstract This white paper describes the unique challenges associated with high speed digital communication over existing in-building powerlines. The solutions provided by the 14 Mbps HomePlug 1.0 protocol are described and an overview of the 200 Mbps HomePlug AV protocol is given. The latter protocol is optimized for multimedia voice and video services, while also providing high speed data communication. I. INTRODUCTION Interest in Powerline Communications There has been a great deal of recent interest in leveraging the existing electrical wiring within and connected to buildings for high speed digital communications [1]. In-home LANs using powerline communication (PLC) are now a reality with products based on the HomePlug 1.0 standard in use worldwide since 2000. [2][3]. PLC LANs using the 14 Mbps HomePlug 1.0 chipsets, provide full house coverage at typical TCP data rates of 5-7 Mbps, and exhibit greater stability than competing wireless LAN solutions [4,10]. In addition there is curerent activity in the deployment of Broadband Powerline (BPL) for Internet access [5, 6, 7]. BPL and WiFi (IEEE 802.11x) are seriously considered as two other possible offering to complement such broadband services as Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) and Cable TV Modems. BPL has the advantage of ease of installation with literal ‘plug and play’ and greater penetration inside the home. Thus the powerline, historically used for the delivery of electrical power, now also provides a high speed digital digital pipe to the home and a ‘no new wires’ communication network inside. Multimedia In-home Networking While HomePlug 1.0 provides acceptable data rates and performance for data communication needs in connecting multiple computers and peripherals in a LAN setting, higher data rates and more stringent QoS controls are needed to support digital mulitmedia communication within the home[8]. The HomePlug AV standard expected to be available in the last half of 2005, is optimized for precisely this scenario. A single stream of High Definition Televison (HDTV) may require about 25 Mbps and a typical scenario may require support for a number of simultaneous multimedia streams of voice, audio and video. Moreover multimedia applications also have latency, jitter and packet loss probability (PLP) requirements that must be met for optimal performance (see Table 1). Application Bandwidth (Mbps) Latency (msec) Jitter (nsec) PLP (log) HDTV 25 300 500 -10 SDTV 4 300 500 -10 DVD 6 300 500 -10 VOIP 64 10 10000 -2 Gaming 0.1 10 N/A -6 Video conf. 1 75 10000 -6 Table 1 – Typical Multimedia QoS Requirements Although there are several existing in- home communication tech-nologies that appear to be capable of providing the basis for such multimedia communication, a careful examination reveals several possible deficiencies. For example, the popular IEEE 802.x suite of