Power Allocation for Relay-Assisted Indoor Power Line Communication Systems

Abstract

Using the worldwide already existing power lines as a communication medium for local area networking (LAN) has received much interest for many indoor information sharing applications. However, the indoor power line communication (PLC) channels demonstrate hostile characteristics for broadband signal transmission. A lot of efforts have been made in order to apply some advanced technologies, which were originally developed for wireless environment, into PLC channels. In this work, we address a simple but practical cooperative transmission strategy in indoor PLC environment. Our main contributions can be summarized as: (1) The theoretical optimal condition for power allocation between transmitter and relay device has been derived. (2) The performance improvement of the cooperative amplify-and forward (CAF) scheme has been investigated, with respect to the conventional direct transmission (DT) scheme.