Netgear Powerline AV 200 XAVB2001 RTT measurements with SPP

This report presents work that was performed to analyze the behaviour of traffic traversing Powerline adapters. Powerline adapters are networking equipment which modulate network traffic onto electrical wiring to transfer data. These adapters can provide up to 200 Mbps of bandwidth. In our tests, the adapters synchronized between 168 and 193 Mbps (at the physical layer) on average. We tested the adapters with TCP and UDP traffic to observe how they would behave when traffic is sent at varying rates. The TCP file transfer experienced a median RTT between 4 and 24 ms for offered rates from 1 to over 70Mbps. Uni-directional UDP traffic with offered loads from 1 and 40 Mbps experienced median RTTs between 2 and 16 ms, while offered loads over 40 Mbps led to significant increase in median RTT of almost 2000 ms.