Measuring link characteristics of power line communication systems

Knowing link characteristics of a network connection is essential for the efficient design, management, and usage of a network. In view of the proliferation of power line communication systems, in this work, we propose a novel measurement approach, called PLC-Probe, to concurrently measure link capacity and available bandwidth of PLC links. PLC-Probe uses `train-chirps´ to probe the network, and it combines the strengths of the packet train and packet chirp approaches for estimation of link characteristics. Using testbed experiment, we evaluate the proposed approach and show that PLC-Probe is accurate, stable, and robust against cross traffic. Moreover, PLC-Probe is simple, effective, and applicable to other multi-rated PLC-like networks.