Optimization for relay-assisted broadband power line communication systems with QoS requirements under time-varying channel conditions

Abstract

The user experience of practical indoor power line communication (PLC) applications is greatly affected by the system quality-of-service (QoS) criteria. With a general broadcast-and-multi-access (BMA) relay scheme, in this work we investigate the joint source and relay power optimization of the amplify-and-forward (AF) relay systems used under indoor broadband PLC environments. To achieve both time diversity and spatial diversity from the relay-involved PLC channel, which is time-varying in nature, the source node has been configured to transmit an identical message twice in the first and second signalling phase, respectively. The QoS constrained power allocation problem is not convex, which makes the global optimal solution is computationally intractable. To solve this problem, an alternating optimization (AO) method has been adopted and decomposes this problem into three convex/quasi-convex sub-problems. Simulation results show the fast convergence and short delay of the proposed algorithm under realistic relay-involved PLC channels. Compared with the two-hop and broadcast-and- forward (BF) relay systems, the proposed general relay system meets the same QoS requirement with less network power assumption.