Cooperative Multihop AF Relay Protocol for Medium-Voltage Power-Line-Access Network

This paper proposes a cooperative multihop amplify-and-forward (AF) relay protocol for a medium-voltage (MV) power-line access network. The relay transmission scheme is a promising protocol since it provides enhanced network channel capacity which exploits cooperative diversity by combining the relayed signal and the direct signal. We propose a new signaling model for the cooperative multihop AF relay protocol and derive a closed-form expression of the channel capacity. The channel capacity of the proposed protocol is analyzed over the MV power-line channel and noise models. Numerical simulations show that the proposed protocol introduces a notable capacity increase compared to conventional multihop schemes.