Cooperative multihop power line communications

Data communication over power line networks has a number of similarities with communication using wireless transmission. This (probably) goes back to fact that neither power lines nor wireless channels were designed for carrying communication signals. As a result, a number of techniques successfully used in wireless communications have found their way into power line communications (PLC). This has recently been extended to relaying, or more generally, cooperative communications. In this paper, we first show that, different from the wireless domain, cooperative communication does not provide a diversity advantage for typical PLC networks. Secondly, we introduce and compare different approaches of multihop transmission known from wireless communications to PLC. We compare their performances and, supported by numerical results, conclude that cooperative multihop is the preferred choice in terms of end-to-end transmission rate.