A Hybrid Power Line/Wireless Dual-Hop System With Energy Harvesting Relay

This paper investigates the benefits that energy harvesting (EH) can offer to increase energy efficiency in hybrid power line/wireless data communication systems for smart grid (SG) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In this regard, the ergodic achievable data rates of a hybrid power line/wireless dual-hop system (H2HS) model that uses EH strategies and the amplify-and-forward protocol at the relay node are considered. Also, four approaches for performing EH in the H2HS system are discussed. Performance comparisons among the H2HS, a dualhop power line and a dual-hop wireless systems are performed by adopting four simulation settings, covering the combinations of optimal or uniform power allocation together with colored or white additive noise at the output of the power line channel. Numerical results show that the H2HS model with the power splitting EH strategy outperforms the other models. Moreover, if the transmission power of the source node is high, then the case with additive colored noise at the received power line signal can result in higher achievable data rates in comparison to the white noise case. Overall, the H2HS system making use of an EH strategy has the potential to increase the sustainability and energy efficiency in data communications for SG and IoT applications.