Performance analysis of dual-hop mixed PLC/RF communication systems

In this article, we study a dual-hop mixed power line communication and radio-frequency communication (PLC/RF) system, where the connection between the PLC link and the RF link is made by a decode-and-forward or amplify-and-forward relay. It is assumed that the PLC channel is affected by both additive background noise and Poisson–Gaussian impulsive noise which suffer from log-normal fading, while the RF link undergoes generalized Rician fading. Based on this model, analytical expressions for the outage probability (OP), average bit error rate (BER), and the average channel capacity (ACC) are derived. Furthermore, asymptotic analyses for the OP and average BER as well as an upper bound expression for the ACC are presented. Illustrative numerical results are presented along with insightful discussions.