Incremental Selective Decode-and-Forward Relaying for Power Line Communication

Abstract

In this paper, an incremental selective decode-and-forward (ISDF) relay\nstrategy is proposed for power line communication (PLC) systems to improve the\nspectral efficiency. Traditional decode-and-forward (DF) relaying employs two\ntime slots by using half-duplex relays which significantly reduces the spectral\nefficiency. The ISDF strategy utilizes the relay only if the direct link\nquality fails to attain a certain information rate, thereby improving the\nspectral efficiency. The path gain is assumed to be log-normally distributed\nwith very high distance dependent signal attenuation. Furthermore, the additive\nnoise is modeled as a Bernoulli-Gaussian process to incorporate the effects of\nimpulsive noise contents. Closed-form expressions for the outage probability\nand the fraction of times the relay is in use, and an approximate closed-form\nexpression for the average bit error rate (BER) are derived for the binary\nphase-shift keying signaling scheme. We observe that the fraction of times the\nrelay is in use can be significantly reduced compared to the traditional DF\nstrategy. It is also observed that at high transmit power, the spectral\nefficiency increases while the average BER decreases with increase in the\nrequired rate.\n