Benchmarking and QoS of In-House Powerline Equipment under Noisy Conditions

This paper focuses on a systematical method for introducing noise (jammers) into a powerline network in order to measure the consequences on QoS for operating in-house powerline equipment under noisy conditions. Different kinds of jamming noise are introduced to a basic powerline network, and the bandwidth (throughput) is measured and compared for different types of commercially available powerline-to-Ethernet adapters. Other QoS parameters are measured and compared for selected white-noise levels. A simple white-noise generator is proposed and the use of continuous pulse train signals to emulate pulsed noise (and multi carrier) interference is discussed and tested. To enable easy and safe measurements of powerline noise levels, and to be able to introduce jamming noise into the basic powerline network, a simple coupling circuit is proposed.