Performance Analysis of Dual-Hop Mixed PLC/RF Communication Systems

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the performance of a dual-hop PLC/RF communication system with different fading and noise models, deriving analytical expressions for key performance metrics and validating them through numerical simulations.

Contribution

It provides new analytical expressions for outage probability, BER, and channel capacity in a mixed PLC/RF system with specific fading and noise conditions.

Findings

Analytical formulas for outage probability and BER derived.

Upper bounds for channel capacity established.

Numerical results confirm analytical accuracy.

Abstract

In this paper, we study a dual-hop mixed power line communication and radio-frequency communication (PLC/RF) system, where the connection between the PLC link and the RF link is made by a decode-and-forward (DF) or amplify-and-forward (AF) relay. Assume that the PLC channel is affected by both additive background noise and impulsive noise suffers from Log-normal fading, while the RF link undergoes Rician fading. Based on this model, analytical expressions of the outage probability (OP), average bit error rate (BER), and the average channel capacity (ACC) are derived. Furthermore, an asymptotic analysis for the OP and average BER, as well as an upper bound expression for the ACC are presented. At last, numerical results are developed to validate our analytical results, and in-depth discussions are conducted.