Performance Analysis of a Dual-Hop Wireless-Power Line Mixed Cooperative System

Wireless communications and power line communications (PLC) are essential components for smart grid communications. This paper analyses the performance of a dual-hop wireless-power line mixed communication setup employing a decode-and-forward relay in terms of analytical average bit error rate (BER), outage probability, and average channel capacity. The Nakagami- m distribution captures the wireless channel fading; whereas the PLC channel gain is characterized by the Log-normal distribution. The additive PLC channel noise is assumed to be Bernoulli-Gaussian distributed. Approximate closed-form expression of the average BER and exact closed-form expression of the outage probability are derived for the considered system. Further, we obtain an approximate closed-form expression of the capacity of the wireless-power line mixed system in terms of the Meijer-G function. It is observed that the system performance deteriorates as the impulsive noise index and the arrival probability of the impulsive component of the PLC additive noise increase.