Dual-hop communications over PLC/?-? and PLC/?-? fading channels

In this study, the performance analysis of dual-hop power line communication (PLC)/$$\eta -\mu $$eta-mu and PLC/$$\lambda -\mu $$lambda-mu L-branch systems by using the decode-and-forward (DF) protocol is presented in detail. The introduced work provides novel closed-form expressions of the probability density function (PDF) of the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the considered systems. Taking the proposed PDFs into account, we also derive closed-form expressions of the error rate and channel capacity (CC) performance for the dual-hop PLC/$$\eta -\mu $$eta-mu and PLC/$$\lambda -\mu $$lambda-mu L-branch DF systems. Furthermore, an exhaustive comparative study of different modulation types such as non-coherent M-ary frequency-shift keying, square quadrature amplitude modulation (SQAM), and cross quadrature amplitude modulation (xQAM) is presented by using the proposed closed-form error rate expressions. Also, the exact expressions for the CC with channel inversion with a fixed-rate (CIFR) transmission policy are proposed. Finally, all the theoretical findings are confirmed through numerical results obtained by using the exact expressions.