Cooperative in-home Power Line Communication: analyses based on a measurement campaign

Abstract

This work focuses on analyses of cooperative protocols to enhance the performance of in-home power line communication (PLC) systems based on a data set consisting of measurements of in-home PLC channels. The discussed analyses address theoretical channel capacity when amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols are considered. Similar investigations are performed for the maximum data rate attained by using Hermitian-symmetric orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (HS-OFDM) together with equal gain combining (EGC), selection combining (SC) and maximal ratio combining (MRC) techniques. Also, the influences of optimally and uniformly allocated transmission power and frequency bandwidth are analyzed. The attained results show that the relative distance among source, relay, and destination nodes severely impacts the system performance. Also, numerical results reveal a range of optimal transmission power and frequency bandwidth in which improvement can be verified. Moreover, it is observed that the advantage of the DF protocol related to AF one ends, when the symbol detection error achieves a threshold. Additionally, it is shown that among the combining techniques, MRC and SC present similar results with MRC offering slightly better performance, but considering computational complexity, a decision in favor of SC is recommended. Finally, a maximum data rate analysis of HS-OFDM with frequency domain equalizer based on zero forcing and minimum mean square error shows that the former scheme offers almost the same performance as the latter.