Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) - CISE

4-June-07 P1901_PRO_016_r0
The second section shall include the data themselves and can contain the maximum capabilities of either one or
several nodes.
Each set of maximum capabilities shall be preceded by the MAC address of the node that can perform this set of
capabilities.
The different maximum capabilities that can be present in a BPL cell shall be divided into two different groups:
• Common capabilities (vendor independent capabilities)
• Vendor dependent capabilities
Common capabilities shall be always sent in the messages. They are sent by means of a variable-length set of fields,
whose contents and meaning will be determined by the protocol.
The vendor dependent capabilities shall be divided themselves in capabilities associated with:
• Chip version.
• Reference design.
• Firmware.
Common capabilities shall not require a division among chip, firmware or reference design related capabilities,
because these capabilities shall be the same for all types of nodes and vendors.
On the other hand, vendor dependent capabilities shall be divided into the three described sections, because a
solution may present different vendors for each part of the system; one vendor for the chip, other for the firmware
and a third one for the reference design, and each vendor may sent its own information inside the vendor dependent
section.
The Maximum Capabilities section of the MAX_CAP_MSG message shall follow this division also, with two main
sections, where the first one shall be the common capabilities section and the second one the vendor dependent
section.
The common capabilities section shall be simply composed by a first field of length in bytes, and a second variablelength
field that shall include the fields that will be determined by the protocol. There are up to 64 entries in the
NCT and PCT for common capabilities.
The vendor dependent capabilities section shall be subdivided into three main subsections: Chip, Reference Design
and Firmware. For each subsection, two possible schemes of sending capabilities shall be allowed: Indexed and
Enumerated.
When using the Indexed scheme, it is only required to send a part of sender’s NCT to fill the entire NCT in the
receiver.
The second one shall be simply an enumeration of each of the capabilities that a node has.
Submission page 222 UPA-OPERA