# Web-Based Toolkit for Performance Simulation and Analysis of Power Line Communication Networks
## 4 Description of the Developed Toolkit
### SimPRIME  
The developed web application consists of several screens. This section will focus on the screen of the web application, which allows configuring a new simulation and ordering its execution (shown in Figure 4), as well as on how this is made possible. As Figure 4 shows, the application allows configuring the following parameters:  
* Name: It is recommended to enter names that allow easily identifying the simulation, as well as distinguishing it from similar ones. Nevertheless, the application assigns a unique identifier to each simulation (ID). * Duration: This field refers to the actual time to be simulated (in seconds). The simulation in principle will always take longer. It is recommended to establish a duration of more than 5000 s to ensure that the network is established and that measurements of the time to obtain consumption reports can be taken from all smart meters in the network (the so-called TTRAll). It is also recommended to avoid entering too high values to avoid that the simulations last too long. * Repetitions: The number of repetitions must be set considering the value entered in the \"Duration\" field. To obtain statistically significant results, it is necessary to have a minimum number of samples (e.g., more than 100). Therefore, considering that the time the network needs to get established is approximately 1000 s, if theoretically it is calculated that the time it takes for the concentrator to obtain a certain consumption report if all the smart meters in the network is 1000 s and a \"Duration\" equals to 5000 s is set, it would be known that four TTRAll values would be obtained in one execution. Therefore, if more than 100 values are wanted, a value greater than 25 should be entered in \"Repeats\". * Constellation: This drop-down allows selecting the constellation that the smart meter uses to transmit. Any of the constellations that the PRIME standard supports (i.e., DBPKS, DQPSK, D8 PSK, with FEC OFF or ON) can be selected. If the \"Dynamic\" option is selected, the constellation is dynamically negotiated between each pair of nodes based on the channel conditions, as defined in the standard. By default, the most robust constellation is used (i.e., DBBSK with FEC ON). * Topology file: It can be a standard logical topology file in XML format (standard S11 report) or a compressed file (ZIP) containing the actual power infrastructure topology in Shapefile format [30] together with an Excel file indicating the meters with and without communication capabilities in the considered scenario. * BER (Bit Error Rate). This parameter only takes effect when an S11 report is provided as a topology file. BER1 refers to the bit error rate between all nodes that are in the same logical level and BER2 to the bit error rate between nodes that are in contiguous  
Figure 4: Screen to configure and execute SimPRIME simulations. logical levels, so BER1 must always be less than BER2. In principle, the current version of the simulator assumes that two nodes that are more than one logical level away cannot \"see\" each other (i.e., BER = 1). These values must be carefully set. If the values are set to high, the result may be that there is no communication between the nodes of the network and, therefore, no results of the execution are obtained. BERs are related to constellations (slower modulations have lower BERs, whereas faster modulations have higher BERs for the same SNR value). BER values in the range of \(10^{-4}\)-\(10^{-5}\) are considered reasonable, with BER1 always being lower than BER2, as discussed above. * Report: Two types of reports are currently supported: S02 (incremental time curve) or S05 (daily billing) [31]. Based on the measurements made in the laboratory available at UC3M, the application-level size for the requests of both reports has been set to 70 bytes. In contrast, the size of the response associated with an S02 report at the application level has been set to 1568 bytes, and that of an S05 has been set to 646 bytes.