Cooperative power line communication: Analysis of Brazilian In-Home channels

This contribution aims at analyzing the suitability of cooperation concepts for improving the performance of power line communication (PLC) systems, more specifically in Brazilian In-Home (IH) electric power grids. For this purpose, the performance of the amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols, together with the equal gain (EGC), selection (SC), and maximal-ratio (MRC) combining techniques were analyzed. The analysis is carried out on measured data covering a frequency band from 1.705 up to 100 MHz. The measured data addresses four scenarios for possible locations of the relay node. The attained results show that the AF is of limited applicability in the PLC context and the opposite is valid to the DF protocol, mainly if the error probability of detecting symbols at the relay is zero. Additionally, it is shown that the EGC can in some cases reduce the system performance.