Power Line Carrier and Wireless Multi-Channel Cooperative Communication Based on Adaptive Relay Selection

Power Line Carrier (PLC) and micropower wireless are two mainstream local communication technologies for low-voltage electricity information acquisition system, the cooperation- and complementarity between which-represent the future development trend. Aiming at the high outage probability deficiency- of traditional PLC and micropower wireless cooperative communications and the insufficient utilization of channel diversity gains, an Adaptive Relay Selection (ARS) based PLC and wireless multi-channel cooperative communication method is proposed. When the quality of the PLC link between the source node and the destination node is poor, the data of the source node is first sent to the potential relay node through the micropower wireless channel. Then, based on the channel quality of the PLC link between the relay node and the destination node, as well as the channel capacity between the source node and the relay node, the relay node and relay mode can be confirmed. Thus, a virtual Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) PLC array can be constructed between the relay node and the destination node, and the system reliability can be improved by using distributed space-timecoding scheme. Simulation results show that, compared with traditional methods, ARS can significantly reduce the outage probability of the relay system, and reduce the transmission error rate via transmission diversity gains of multiple relay nodes.