BER performance of smart grid HAN with RF energy harvesting over RF-THz channel

A dual-hop home area network (HAN) with energy harvesting over mixed fading has been proposed for smart grid (SG) communication. Radio-frequency (RF) and Terahertz (THz) channels with amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relays are the two cases taken into consideration. The Markov chain with multi-user selection combining is used to model the active home appliances. The appliances use RF links for exchanging information with the smart meter (SM). The SM harvests energy from RF signals to transmit data to the control unit through a THz link. The RF and THz links are considered the Saleh-Valenzuela (S-V) and the alpha - mu. distributions, respectively. Here, the space shift keying (SSK) modulation scheme is considered for transferring information from the home appliances to the SM. Closed-form mathematical expressions for average bit error probability (ABEP) are derived for performance analysis. The effects of the energy harvesting time factor, the number of appliances present, the intensity of traffic, and the severity of fading are shown by numerical and Monte Carlo simulation results in the SG communication system.