Performance Evaluation of Power Line Cooperative Communication System

Abstract

-The universality of the power line network presents the power line communication (PLC) as the choice technology for this generation. Its inherent challenges are a major drawback on its acceptability and deployment. These challenges are of noise, attenuation and multipath. In this paper, power line cooperative communication (PLCC) system was presented. The two cooperative transmission protocols deployed, amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward, were preceded by a noise mitigation system. This noise system improves the bit error rate performance of the system. The reliability of the PLCC system was investigated, using channel capacity, symbol error rate and outrage probability as performance metrics. The channel capacity of both cooperative links yields enormous increase as compared to the direct (conventional) link. Systems symbol error rate was drastically reduced and probability of outages forced down on the links with cooperation, thus achieving the systems reliability. In the investigation, the decode-and-forward cooperation protocol out performs the amplify-and-forward, while the noise mitigation system, brought the SER and outage probability of both protocols close. The best performance in cooperation is a relay location midway between source and destination nodes. Thus, cooperative relaying is seen to have achieved reliability of the PLC in broadband transmission. Keywords -Amplify-and-forward, channel capacity, decode-and-forward, symbol error rate, and outage probability