The influence of transmission power and frequency bandwidth on in-home cooperative power line communication

This work aims to analyze the influence of transmission power and frequency bandwidth on in-home cooperative power line communication (PLC) based on channel estimates provided by a measurement campaign. We investigate in-home PLC channels based on cooperation from a single relay model perspective in which the relay node is located in the middle between source and destination nodes by considering closed-form expressions of the maximum data rate of hermitian symmetric orthogonal frequency division multiplexing scheme. The analysis is carried out over the amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols, together with the equal gain combining (EGC), selecting combining (SC) and maximal ratio combining (MRC) techniques. Numerical results show that an increase in frequency bandwidth and/or a decrease in transmission power introduce notable data-rate gains compared to direct link.