Capacity Analysis of an OFDM-Based Two-Hops Relaying PLC Systems

Power Line Communication (PLC) remains the most appropriate communication architectures and technology for Smart Grid (SG) deployment. A major challenge for researchers in SG, is how to supply robust and efficient communication since PLC channel is a fading channel whose characteristics vary considerably over long distances and at high frequencies. To reach this goal, cooperative communication has been proven to be effective. Thus in this paper, we derive the channel capacity for OFDM-based two-hop relaying PLC system where we use a relay node between the source and destination nodes. We analyze channel capacity for Amplify-and-Forward (AF), Decode-and-Forward (DF) relaying protocols and Fountain-code-and-Forward (FCF) protocol which joint cooperative relay and coding techniques. We highlight in this paper how the use of this new category of cooperation relaying protocol (FCF) increases channel capacity of an OFDM-based two-hop relaying PLC system.