Hybrid Power-Line/Wireless Communication Systems For Indoor Applications

Abstract

The high attenuation which increases as frequency increases in power line communication systems (PLC) makes achieving and sustaining high data rates over such channels a challenging task. In most communication systems, relays are normally deployed to overcome the effect of signal attenuation and to achieve reliable transmissions between users. Amplifyand-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relays are often used. In contrast to the existing work on this topic which advocate utilizing relays either between PLC links or between wireless links, the authors of this paper focus on using AF relaying for in-home PLC and wireless systems where one PLC user wants to share data with one wireless user which has no access to the PLC network. We refer to this system as the Hybrid approach. A mathematical method is developed for this network to formulate the capacity of the system by exploiting the statistical properties of both PLC and wireless channels. Monte Carlo simulations are used throughout this paper to validate the analytical results. The impact of several system parameters is investigated in this paper. For the sake of comparison, we also provide the performance analysis and results for a PLC only network. The results showed that the performance of the hybrid system enhances as we increase the relay gain and deteriorates as the end-to-end distance increases. It is also found that the PLC only scheme may outperform the hybrid one if the relay gain is relatively small; however, the user mobility offered by the hybrid system remains the main advantage over the PLC only system. Index Terms-Power-line communications, amplify-andforward, decode-and-forward, wireless communications, signalto-noise ratio.

Communication systems of high‐speed railway: A survey

“…Simply, in this technology, the preinstalled infrastructure of wiring networks of a building or utility grid is utilized for both purposes caring electricity and data transmission to consumers. This advantage makes the PLCs a cost‐effective and competitive technology for in home networking applications 78 . According to its operating frequency this technology is grouped into two different groups, namely narrow‐band PLC (NB‐PLC) and BB‐PLC.…”

On the Performance of DF-based Power-Line/Visible-Light Communication Systems

“…where P s represents the source transmit power, d 1 represents the source-to-relay distance, s(t) is the information signal with E[s]=1, n r is the noise at the relay which is assumed to be complex Gaussian with zero mean and variance σ 2 r , and α is the PLC channel attenuation factor given by α = a 0 + a 1 f k , where a 0 and a 1 are constants determined by measurements, f is the system operating frequency and k denotes the exponent of the attenuation factor [14].…”

Optimisation of indoor hybrid PLC/VLC/RF communication systems

“…The integration of PLC and RF for wireless relaying systems has been proposed for many applications including indoor, outdoor, and smart grids [5][6][7][8][9]. In [5], for instance, wireless relaying systems are integrated with PLC for long distance transmissions.…”

“…In [8], the authors have proposed a multi-channel receiver based hybrid PLC/RF communication system which has been analysed in terms of selection combining and maximal ratio combining methods for fading compensation. The capacity analysis of an amplify-and-forward (AF) relay based cascaded PLC/RF system has been carried out in [9], where, PLC and wireless users communicate with each other through these relays.…”