Performance Analysis of a Dual-Hop Wireless-Power Line Mixed Cooperative System

TLDR: Analysis of a dual-hop wireless-power line mixed communication setup employing a decode-and-forward relay in terms of analytical average bit error rate (BER), outage probability, and average channel capacity finds that the system performance deteriorates as the impulsive noise index and the arrival probability of theImpulsive component of the PLC additive noise increase.

Abstract: Wireless communications and power line communications (PLC) are essential components for smart grid communications. This paper analyses the performance of a dual-hop wireless-power line mixed communication setup employing a decode-and-forward relay in terms of analytical average bit error rate (BER), outage probability, and average channel capacity. The Nakagami- $m$ distribution captures the wireless channel fading; whereas the PLC channel gain is characterized by the Log-normal distribution. The additive PLC channel noise is assumed to be Bernoulli-Gaussian distributed. Approximate closed-form expression of the average BER and exact closed-form expression of the outage probability are derived for the considered system. Further, we obtain an approximate closed-form expression of the capacity of the wireless-power line mixed system in terms of the Meijer-G function. It is observed that the system performance deteriorates as the impulsive noise index and the arrival probability of the impulsive component of the PLC additive noise increase.