Outage Probability Assessment of Power line Cooperative Communication (PLCC) System

The requirement of high-speed data for various forms of application is increasing rapidly. Power Line communication (PLC), a technology which uses the existing power line network as a transmission medium, is a choice for this provision, owing to the ready presence of the medium. This channel (power line), is severely bewitched by noise and attenuation owing to the branches, length and the load connection on the line. Cooperative relaying, which transmits the same information through several nodes is deployed in this paper to combat the data outages caused by the channel's characteristics. Amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward were the cooperative protocols deployed.The outage probability of each of the protocols were obtained, analysed and compared with the conventional direct link (without cooperation). Results shows that outage probability was drastically reduced on the cooperative links. The performances of the two cooperative links were close due to the noise mitigating circuit incorporated.This achievement in outage probability performance enhances the reliability of the PLC system.