Channel characterisation of cooperative relaying power line communication systems

© 2016 IEEE. Power line communication (PLC) technology offers a promising platform for numerous communication applications. The power lines however can significantly attenuate communication signals operating in high frequency band. For this reason, multi-hop PLC systems become desirable. In this paper, we investigates the effect of multi-hop relaying on the power line channel transfer function. Measured results are compared with results obtained from sumulations in Matlab. Results show that the presence of relays between a transmitting and a receiving PLC nodes can intensify the attenuation and frequency selectivity. Measurements show that maximum attenuation increases with number of relays

Broadband PLC for Clustered Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) Architecture

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) subsystems monitor and control energy distribution through exchange of information between smart meters and utility networks. A key challenge is how to select a cost-effective communication system without compromising the performance of the applications. Current communication technologies were developed for conventional data networks with different requirements. It is therefore necessary to investigate how much of existing communication technologies can be retrofitted into the new energy infrastructure to cost-effectively deliver acceptable level of service. This paper investigates broadband power line communications (BPLC) as a backhaul solution in AMI. By applying the disparate traffic characteristics of selected AMI applications, the network performance is evaluated. This study also examines the communication network response to changes in application configurations in terms of packet sizes. In each case, the network is stress-tested and performance is assessed against acceptable thresholds documented in the literature. Results show that, like every other communication technology, BPLC has certain limitations; however, with some modifications in the network topology, it indeed can fulfill most AMI traffic requirements for flexible and time-bounded applications. These opportunities, if tapped, can significantly improve fiscal and operational efficiencies in AMI services. Simulation results also reveal that BPLC as a backhaul can support flat and clustered AMI structures with cluster size ranging from 1 to 150 smart meters

Performance evaluation of multi-hop relaying over non-gaussian PLC channels

Relaying over power line communication (PLC) channels can considerably enhance the performance and reliability of PLC systems. This paper is dedicated to study and analyze the energy efficiency of multi-hop cooperative relaying PLC systems. Incremental decode-and-forward (IDF) relying is exploited to reduce the transmit power consumption. The PLC channel is assumed to experience log-normal fading with impulsive noise. The performances of single-hop and conventional DF relaying systems are also analyzed in terms of outage probability and energy efficiency for which analytical expressions are derived. Results show that using more relays can improve the outage probability performance; however, this is achieved at the expense of increased power consumption due to the increased static power of the relays, especially when the total source-to-destination distance is relatively small. Results also demonstrate that the IDF PLC system has better energy efficiency performance compared to the other schemes

Outage Performance of Fluid Antenna System (FAS)-aided Terahertz Communication Networks

Millimeter-wave networks have already been successfully rolled out in many countries and now the research direction heads toward new technologies and standards to enable Tbps rates for future sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication systems. This work studies a point-to-point terahertz (THz) communication network exploiting the concept of a fluid antenna system (FAS) over correlated alpha-mu fading channels, nicely fitting the THz communication. Furthermore, the considered system is expanded to the selection-combining-FAS (SC-FAS) and maximum-gain-combining- FAS (MGC-FAS) diversity variates at the receiver side. The proposed FAS and its diversity configuration techniques are aimed to combat the high path loss, blockages, and molecular absorption effect related to the THz band. Our contribution includes comprehensive outage probability (OP) performance analysis for the THz band given the non-diversity and diversity FAS receivers. Moreover, the derived outage probability formulas are verified via Monte Carlo simulations. Numerical results have confirmed the superior performance of the MGC-FAS scheme in terms of OP. Finally, this work justifies that a higher number of antenna ports dramatically improves the system performance, even in the presence of correlation.Comment: Accepted for Presentation at IEEE ICC 2023 (Rome, Italy), 6 pages, 5 figure

DFT spread-optical pulse amplitude modulation for visible light communication systems

DC-biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) has been proposed in visible light communication (VLC) to overcome the limited modulation bandwidth of light emitting diode (LED). Due to the implementation of the inverse fast Fourier transform at the DCO-OFDM transmitter, DCO-OFDM suffers from its high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which restricts its use in some VLC applications, especially where the optical power efficiency is a crucial requirement. That is because the LEDs used in VLC systems have a limited optical power-current linear range. To this end, a novel discrete Fourier transform spread-optical pulse amplitude modulation (DFTS-OPAM) signal scheme based on the single carrier-interleaved frequency division multiple access (SC-IFDMA) signal is introduced in this paper to address the high PAPR issue of OFDM. DFTS-OPAM is achieved by considering a PAM as an SC-IFDMA data symbol and duplicate the output vector of the fast Fourier transform at the SC-IFDMA transmitter side. Simulation results show that the PAPR of the proposed scheme is 7 dB lower than that of DCO-OFDM. Furthermore, this significant PAPR improvement is experimentally investigated where the practical results show that the proposed scheme can provide more 2.5 dB reduction in the average transmitted power requirement compared to DCO-OFDM and can subsequently increase the maximum achieved distance between the transmitter and the receiver up to 44%

Physical Layer Security in Vehicular Communication Networks in the Presence of Interference

This paper studies the physical layer security of a vehicular communication network in the presence of interference constraints by analysing its secrecy capacity. The system considers a legitimate receiver node and an eavesdropper node, within a shared network, both under the effect of interference from other users. The double-Rayleigh fading channel is used to capture the effects of the wireless communication channel for the vehicular network. We present the standard logarithmic expression for the system capacity in an alternate form, to facilitate analysis in terms of the joint moment generating functions (MGF) of the random variables representing the channel fading and interference. Closed-form expressions for the MGFs are obtained and Monte-Carlo simulations are provided throughout to validate the results. The results show that performance of the system in terms of the secrecy capacity is affected by the number of interferers and their distances. The results further demonstrate the effect of the uncertainty in eavesdropper location on the analysis