Performance analysis of a multi-hop power line communication system over log-normal fading in presence of impulsive noise

The authors present a study on the end-to-end average bit error rate (BER), the average channel capacity and the outage performance of a multi-hop power line communication (PLC) system equipped with decode-and-forward (DF) relays. To combat the issue of distance dependent signal attenuation, multi-hop data transmission has recently been introduced for PLC systems. However, apart from the distance dependent signal attenuation, PLC systems also suffer from (i) the variation in signal amplitude (fading) because of reflections and (ii) impulsive noise. Thus, in this study, the channel for each hop of the multi-hop PLC system is modelled by a log-normal fading amplitude, which is clubbed to a distance dependent signal attenuation factor. To consider the effect of the impulsive noise along with the background noise, the additive noise at each node is modelled by a Bernoulli-Gaussian process. Analytical expressions for the end-to-end average BER for binary phase-shift keying, the average channel capacity and the outage probability are obtained. The merit of the multi-hop PLC system over a conventional direct transmission PLC system for fixed transmission power is shown through numerical results. The authors' results show that with increasing number of DF relays, the end-to-end average BER, the average channel capacity and the outage performance improve.