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

Relaying over power line communication (PLC) channels can considerably enhance the performance and reliability of PLC systems. This paper is dedicated to study the energy efficiency of multi-hop cooperative relaying PLC systems. In particular, incremental decode-and-forward (IDF) relying is exploited to reduce the transmit power consumption. The PLC channel is assumed to experience log-normal fading with impulsive noise. The performance of single-hop and conventional DF relaying are also analyzed in terms of outage probability and energy efficiency for which analytical expressions are derived. Results show that using more relays can improve 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-todestination distance is relatively small. Results also demonstrate that the proposed IDF PLC system has better energy efficiency performance compared to the other considered schemes.