Performance Evaluation of a PLC Field Trial: The Behavior of the TCP/IP Stack

Power line communications (PLC) are emerging as one of the most promising solutions in order to provide ubiquitous data communications. Hence, utility companies are seriously considering the massive deployment of communications infrastructure to inject and transport data signal information, over the original 50/60 Hz power lines. This paper depicts the results obtained from a pilot in a suburban area, embracing both medium voltage (MV) and low voltage (LV) infrastructures. A set of practical measurements will be carried out over both the MV and the LV networks, in order to characterize the performance of the TCP/UDP/IP protocol stack.