PHY-Level Collision Avoidance

PHY-Level Collision Avoidance (PLCA) is a reconciliation sublayer defined within IEEE 802.3 clause 148. PLCA is used in 802.3cg (10BASE-T1), which focuses on bringing ethernet connectivity to short-haul embedded internet of things and low throughput, noise-tolerant, industrial deployment use cases.

In order for a multidrop 10BASE-T1S standard to successfully compete with CAN XL, some kind of arbitration was necessary. The linear arbitration scheme of PLCA somewhat resembles the one of the Byteflight, but PLCA was designed from scratch to accommodate the existing shared medium Ethernet MACs with their busy sensing mechanisms. A PLCA can be seen as part of the reconciliation sublayer between the PHY and MAC.

Operation

Under a PLCA scheme all nodes are assigned unique sequential numbers (IDs) in the range from 0 to N. Zero ID corresponds to a special "master" node that during the idle intervals transmits the synchronization beacon (a special heartbeat frame). After the beacon each node gets its transmission opportunity (TO), The opportunity interval is very short (typically 20 bits), so overhead for the nodes that do not have anything to transmit is low. If the PLCA circuitry discovers that the node's TO cannot be used (the other node with a lower ID have started its transmission and the media is busy at the beginning of the TO of this node), it asserts the "busy" input of the MAC thus delaying the transmission. The condition is cleared once the node gets its TO.

See also

• Internet of things (IOT)

Sources

• Cena, Gianluca; Scanzio, Stefano; Valenzano, Adriano (2023-04-26). Composite CAN XL-Ethernet Networks for Next-Gen Automotive and Automation Systems (PDF). IEEE. doi:10.1109/wfcs57264.2023.10144116.
• Beruto, Piergiorgio; Orzelli, Antonio (2018). San Diego, CA: IEEE 802.3 Plenary Meeting https://www.ieee802.org/3/cg/public/July2018/PLCA%20overview.pdf. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)