Performance Assessment of Cooperative Relaying in Power Line Communication System

ABSRACT: The cost incurred on installation for broadband data for consumer has made the power line communication the technology to be considered for the provision. As appropriate as this medium is, the challenges inherent in it makes high-speed transmission unreliable, as signal propagated through it suffers attenuation, experiences multipath and bewitchment of noise. This causes depreciation of the signal as it traverses the medium (power line). This paper considers cooperative relaying for the improvement of PLC reliability. It deploys cooperative transmission protocols, amplify-and-forwad and decode-and-forward. Three links were investigated for symbol error rate and outage probability. These links are amplify-and-forward cooperative link, decode-and-forward cooperative link and non-cooperative link (PLC conventional). The cooperative links achieved reduction in symbol error rate and outage probability, with th decode-and-forward having the best performance.