On the Energy Efficiency of Multi-hop Cooperative Relaying Power Line Communication Systems

In this paper, we analyze the energy efficiency performance of multi-hop cooperative relaying power line communication (PLC) systems. In order to further minimize the energy consumption of such systems, we study the performance of incremental decode-and-forward (IDF) relying over the lognormal fading PLC channel contaminated with impulsive noise. For more realistic scenario, the PLC modems power consumption profile is assumed to consist of both dynamic and static powers. For the sake of comparison and completeness, we also investigate the performance of single-hop PLC systems. In this respect, accurate analytical expressions for the outage probability and energy efficiency are derived for the three systems under consideration which are then verified with Monte Carlo simulations. Results have revealed that using more relays improves the outage probability performance; however this is achieved at the expense of increased power consumption due to the increased static power of the relays, especially when the total source-to-destination distance is relatively small. It is also shown that the proposed IDF relaying PLC system has better energy efficiency performance compared to the other systems studied.