On Performance Characterization of Cascaded Multiwire-PLC/MIMO-RF Communication System

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a cascaded power line communication and RF system that combines PLC and RF technologies to improve coverage and data rates, especially in non-line-of-sight scenarios, using a decode-and-forward relaying scheme.

Contribution

It introduces a novel opportunistic DF-based multi-wire/RF relaying system and derives closed-form expressions for key performance metrics, validated by simulations.

Findings

Outperforms wireless-only systems in coverage and data rate.

Closed-form expressions for outage probability, BER, and capacity.

System benefits are significant in NLoS conditions.

Abstract

The flexibility of radio frequency (RF) systems and the omnipresence of power cables potentially make the cascaded power line communication (PLC)/RF system an efficient and cost-effective solution in terms of wide coverage and high-speed transmission. This letter proposes an opportunistic decode-and-forward (DF)-based multi-wire/RF relaying system to exploit the advantages of both techniques. The outage probability, bit error rate, and system channel capacity are correspondingly chosen to analyze the properties of the proposed system, which are derived in closed-form expressions and validated via Monte-Carlo simulations. One can observe that our proposed system outperforms the wireless-only system in terms of coverage and data rate, especially when there exists a non-line-of-sight (NLoS) connection between the transmitter and receiver pair.