Incremental Relaying for Power Line Communication: Performance Analysis and Power Allocation

TL;DR

This paper introduces incremental relaying strategies for power line communication that enhance spectral efficiency by using relays only when necessary, with analytical performance expressions and optimized power allocation.

Contribution

It proposes IDF and ISDF relaying schemes for power line communication, providing analytical performance metrics and demonstrating improved spectral efficiency over traditional methods.

Findings

IDF is a special case of ISDF with optimal spectral efficiency.

Closed-form outage probability and capacity expressions derived.

Power allocation based on channel parameters improves outage performance.

Abstract

In this paper, incremental decode-and-forward (IDF) and incremental selective decode-and-forward (ISDF) relaying are proposed to improve the spectral efficiency of power line communication. Contrary to the traditional decode-and-forward (DF) relaying, IDF and ISDF strategies utilize the relay only if the direct link ceases to attain a certain information rate, thereby improving the spectral efficiency. The path gain through the power line is assumed to be log-normally distributed with high distance-dependent attenuation and the additive noise is from a Bernoulli-Gaussian process. Closed-form expressions for the outage probability, and approximate closed-form expressions for the end-to-end average channel capacity and the average bit error rate for binary phase-shift keying are derived. Furthermore, a closed-form expression for the fraction of times the relay is in use is derived as a measure of the spectral efficiency. Comparative analysis of IDF and ISDF with traditional DF relaying is presented. It is shown that IDF is a specific case of ISDF and can obtain optimal spectral efficiency without compromising the outage performance. By employing power allocation to minimize the outage probability, it is realized that the power should be allocated in accordance with the inter-node distances and channel parameters.