A Measurement Based Study to Assess Power Line Communication Network Throughput Performance

Abstract

Power line communications (PLC) is a known low cost technology which is easily installed and extended to the various connections especially to areas with poor wireless coverage. Unfortunately, designers and users experience technical problems that arise from the difficulty of operating on a complex time varying medium and that limits the expected high throughput. Therefore, testing and understanding network dynamics of PLC systems before usage is a necessity. This paper presents the findings obtained from the experiments carried out in order to verify the throughput performance of PLC systems. Experimental measurements are realized in different testbeds, under different times and conditions, in order to achieve an idea of the practical PLC performance. Data obtained from the measurements have been stored and the throughput is analyzed by the help of software. Following, using distribution fitting methods, it is shown that the PLC throughput may be modeled by the extreme value distribution. Furthermore, adding a basic noise to the network, simply by lamps, results with a degraded performance. The noise changes the parameters of the derived distributions; a decrease in expected value and an increase in standard deviation are observed.

Keywords

• Experimental measurements,extreme value distribution,distribution fitting,power line communications

References

1. S. Mudriievskyi, “Power Line Communications: State of the art in research, development and application”, AEU International Journal of Electronics and Communications, vol. 68, no. 7, pp. 575-577, 2014.
2. G. López, J. I. Moreno, E. Sánchez, C. Martínez, F. Martín, “Noise Sources, Effects and Countermeasures in Narrowband Power-Line Communications Networks: A Practical Approach”, Energies, vol. 10, no. 8, pp. 1238, 2017.
3. P. Mlynek, Z. Hasirci, J. Misurec, et al., “Analysis of Channel Transfer Functions in Power Line Communication System for Smart Metering and Home Area Network”, Advances in Electrical and Computer Engineering, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 51-56, 2016.
4. Z. Chen, X. Geng, F. Yin, “A Fractional Lower Order Statistics-Based MIMO Detection Method in Impulse Noise for Power Line Channel”, Advances in Electrical and Computer Engineering, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 81-86, 2014.
5. A. Ikpehai, B. Adebisi, K. M. Rabie, R. Haggar, M. Baker, “Experimental Study of 6LoPLC for Home Energy Management Systems”, Energies, vol. 9, no. 12, pp. 1046, 2016.
6. I. Tsokalo, “Influence of the channel instability on the PLC QoS”, AEU International Journal of Electronics and Communications, vol. 68, no. 7, pp. 581-583, 2014.
7. ETSI TR 102 049 V1.1.1, “PowerLine Telecommunications (PLT); quality of service (QoS) requirements for in-house systems”, 2005, Available: www.etsi.org.
8. G. Betta, D. Capriglione, L. Ferrigno, M. Laracca, “A measurement-driven approach to assess power line telecommunication (PLT) network quality of Service (QoS) performance parameters”, Measurement Science and Technology, vol. 20, no. 10, pp. 1-11, 2009.

9. P. L. So, Y. H. Ma, “Development of a test bed for power line communications”, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 1174-1182, 2004.
10. P. Tinnakornsrisuphap, P. Purkayastha, B. Mohanty, “Coverage and Capacity Analysis of Hybrid Home Networks”, International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications, Communication QoS and System Modeling Symposium, pp. 117-123, 2014.
11. Y. J. Lin, H. A. Latchman, R.E. Newman, S. Katar, “A Comparative Performance Study of Wireless and Power Line Networks”, IEEE Communication Magazine, vol. 41, no. 4: 54-63, 2003.
12. G. Horvat, Z. Balkic, D. Zagar, “Power Line Communication throughput analysis for use in last mile rural broadband”, 20th Telecommunications Forum, pp. 245-248, 2012.
13. B. Zarikoff, D. Malone, “Construction of a PLC Test Bed for Network and Transport Layer Experiments”, IEEE International Symposium on Power Line Communications and Its Applications, pp. 135-140, 2011.
14. E. S. Kapareliotis, K. E. Drakakis, H. K. Dimitriades, C. Capsalis, “Throughput Analysis on BPL Networks”, Microwave Review, pp. 35-40, 2008.
15. V. Gutierrez, J. A. Galache, R. Aguero, L. Munoz, “Performance Evaluation of a PLC Field Trial: The Behavior of the TCP/IP Stack”, IEEE International Symposium on Power Line Communications and Its Applications, pp. 278-284, 2007.
16. M. Y. Chung, M. H. Jung, T. Lee, Y. Lee, “Performance Analysis of HomePlug 1.0 MAC with CSMA/CA”, IEEE International Journal on Selected Areas on Communications, vol. 24, no. 7, pp. 1411-1420, 2006.
17. M. Mizutani, Y. Miyoshi, K. Tsukamoto, et al., “Network-supported TCP rate control for high-speed power line communications environments”, Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 69-83, 2011.
18. R. Murty, J. Padhye, R. Chandra, A. R. Chowdhury, M. Welsh “Characterizing the end-to-end performance of indoor powerline networks”, Technical report, 2008.
19. B. Jensen, H. Slavensky, S. Kjaersgaard, “Benchmarking and QoS of In-House Powerline Equipment for AV Streaming Applications”, IEEE International Symposium on Power Line Communications and Its Applications, pp. 160-165, 2006.
20. K. P. Burnham, D. R. Anderson, “Multimodel inference: understanding AIC and BIC in Model Selection”, Sociological Methods & Research, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 261–304, 2004.
21. S. Kotz, S. Nadarajah, “Extreme Value Distributions: Theory and Applications”, London: Imperial College Press, 2000.