Multi-User Joint Subchannel and Power Resource-Allocation for Powerline Relay Networks

This paper investigates orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA) resource-allocation schemes for two-hop relays in a home powerline communication (PLC) network. Unlike wireless channels, which can have noticeable path loss and shadow effects to bring a substantial relay gain, the powerline channel usually observes a quality of the relay channel on par with the direct link so that simple fixed relay configurations often lose performance instead of gaining any. Besides, the quasi-cyclostationary powerline channel benefits little from diversity combining, a scheme often found in cooperative wireless relay protocols to obtain performance improvements on fast fading channels. To address these special and challenging features of the powerline channel, home-PLC relay protocols that jointly allocate subchannels and power to the source and relay nodes are proposed. Simulation results show that significant improvements of data rates can be achieved by jointly optimizing the subchannel and power allocation of home-PLC relay networks.