Performance of Hybrid ARQ over Power Line Communications Channels

Power line communications (PLC) system performance is severely affected by the presence of impulsive noise and channel gain. Many communication systems employ a combination of forward error correction and automatic repeat request (ARQ) to detect transmission errors known as hybrid ARQ (HARQ). Thus, HARQ can be used to improve the reliability of a PLC system. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of a PLC system under the influence of impulsive noise over Rayleigh and Log-Normal channel gains using HARQ with chase combining scheme. Closed-form expressions of the analytical outage probability are derived for these two channel gain scenarios. Using the expression for outage probability, we also compute the average throughput for the PLC system under the given channel gain scenarios. It is observed by the analysis that the outage performance of the considered PLC system is significantly improved with the use of HARQ.