Abstract
WiFi-capable PLC (Poiver Line Communications) plug-and-play extenders are becoming popular to improve WiFi range and coverage in homes and enterprises. As shown in prior work, unlike an Ethernet backhaul, the PLC backhaul may not support high data rates. In addition, clients (users) that are either far or partially occluded from the WiFi-PLC extender they associate with can experience fading and shadowing, which degrades the throughput on the wireless link. Thus, both the PLC and WiFi backhauls will influence a user's end-to-end throughput. In this paper, we seek to exploit the presence of multiple PLC extenders that may be plugged in, by combining their transmissions in a distributed antenna system (DAS), to boost client throughputs in a home setting. Specifically, we design PLC-DAS to determine which PLC extenders are the best candidates for forming a joint DAS transmitter cluster to each client. PLC-DAS is designed based on a real measurement study and not only accounts for the WiFi link qualities from the extenders to the users, but also the PLC link qualities from each extender to a master router which is typically deployed in homes. PLC-DAS is flexible and can maximize the throughput under different fairness objectives. We evaluate PLC-DAS via extensive simulations and show that it can increase the aggregate throughput by up to 4.5x compared to blindly using all WiFi PLC extenders to form a DAS transmitter, while maintaining a fairness Jain's index value of at least 0.97 with proportional and max-min fairness models.