Performance Evaluation of Multi-hop Relaying over Non-Gaussian PLC Channels

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the energy efficiency of multi-hop relaying in power line communication channels with non-Gaussian noise, highlighting the benefits of incremental decode-and-forward relaying for improved performance.

Contribution

It introduces an analysis of energy efficiency for multi-hop PLC systems with impulsive noise, proposing the use of incremental decode-and-forward relaying to reduce power consumption.

Findings

More relays improve outage probability but increase power consumption.

IDF relaying outperforms other schemes in energy efficiency.

Relays' static power impacts overall energy efficiency.

Abstract

Relaying over power line communication (PLC) channels can considerably enhance the performance and reliability of PLC systems. This paper is dedicated to study and analyze the energy efficiency of multi-hop cooperative relaying PLC systems. Incremental decode-and-forward (IDF) relying is exploited to reduce the transmit power consumption. The PLC channel is assumed to experience log-normal fading with impulsive noise. The performances of single-hop and conventional DF relaying systems are also analyzed in terms of outage probability and energy efficiency for which analytical expressions are derived. Results show that using more relays can improve the outage probability performance; however, this is achieved at the expense of increased power consumption due to the increased static power of the relays, especially when the total source-to-destination distance is relatively small. Results also demonstrate that the IDF PLC system has better energy efficiency performance compared to the other schemes.