Evaluation of PLC Channel Capacity and ABER Performances for OFDM-Based Two-Hop Relaying Transmission

Abstract

Powerline network is recognized as a favorable infrastructure for Smart Grid to transmit information in the network thanks to its broad coverage and low cost deployment. The existing works are trying to improve and adapt transmission techniques to reduce Powerline Communication (PLC) channel attenuation and exploit the limited bandwidth to support high data rate over long distances. Two-hop relaying BroadBand PLC (BB-PLC) system, in which Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is used, is considered in this paper. We derive and compare the PLC channel capacity and the end-to-end Average BER (ABER) for OFDM-based direct link (DL) BB-PLC system and for OFDM-based two-hop relaying BB-PLC system for Amplify and Forward (AF) and Decode and Forward (DF) protocols. We analyze the improvements when we consider the direct link in a cooperative communication when the relay node only transmits the correctly decoded signal. Maximum ratio combining is employed at the destination node to detect the transmitted signal. In addition, in this paper, we highlight the impact of the relay location on the channel capacity and ABER for AF and DF transmission protocols. Moreover, an efficient use of the direct link was also investigated in this paper.