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

Sana Ezzine,Jean Pierre Cances,Fatma Abdelkefi,Ammar Bouallégue,Vahid Meghdadi

doi:10.1155/2017/4827274

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.

Highlights

Despite the fact that Powerline Communication (PLC) is still a very new medium for data transmission and that the international standards for Powerline Communication are still in the process of being developed and implemented, PLC is becoming a more current method for data transmission
Improve the channel capacity and Average Bit Error Rate (BER) (ABER) performances compared to an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)-based direct link (DL)-PLC system
We proved that varying the relay location, between source node and destination node and the scenario, has a significant impact on the channel capacity and ABER performances

Summary

Introduction

Despite the fact that Powerline Communication (PLC) is still a very new medium for data transmission and that the international standards for Powerline Communication are still in the process of being developed and implemented, PLC is becoming a more current method for data transmission. In [16], authors studied the channel capacity of OFDM two-hop relaying PLC systems for Medium-Voltage (MV) powerlines for AF and DF protocols, over three wires, depending on the expectation of the noise at the destination node. Their researches have been performed for different MV topologies access networks for urban and rural environments [17]. We propose a solution based on data signal assignment indices permutation over the subcarriers to optimize the use of direct link in the second scenario for OFDM-based two-hop relaying PLC-AF and PLC-DF systems to improve the channel capacity and ABER performances. We will use the superscripts ⋅∗ to denote element-wise conjugation and E[⋅] to denote the expectation operator

PLC Channel and System Model

Performance Analysis

Simulation Results

Conclusion