Relay Transmission Protocols for In-Door Powerline Communications Networks

In this paper, relay protocols for one or more relay nodes, employing either Amplify-and-Forward (AF) or Decode-and-Forward (DF) are discussed for frequency selective fading channel environment and coloured background noise in powerline communications (PLC) networks. Also, the performance of beamforming aided multi-relay protocols and bidirectional single relay protocols are analysed. The achievable information rate and the Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of achievable information rates for each protocol are obtained through the simulations. The difference among relay protocols are given in the simulation results. The work shows that relay has the potential of resolving the resource scarcity problem for some resource demonding applications in the indoor PLC networks, and helps enlarge the coverage of power grid.